The Island

1

for a long TIME I stayed away from the Acropolis. It daunted me, that somber rock. I preferred to wander in the modern city, imperfect, blaring. The weight and moment of those worked stones promised to make the business of seeing them a complicated one. So much converges there. It’s what we’ve rescued from the madness. Beauty, dignity, order, proportion. There are obligations attached to such a visit.Then there was the question of its renown. I saw myself climbing the rough streets of the Plaka, past the discos, the handbag shops, the rows of bamboo chairs. Slowly, out of every bending lane, in waves of color and sound, came tourists in striped sneakers, fanning themselves with postcards, the philhellenes, laboring uphill, vastly unhappy, mingling in one unbroken line up to the monumental gateway.What ambiguity there is in exalted things. We despise them a little.I kept putting off a visit. The ruins stood above the hissing traffic like some monument to doomed expectations. I’d turn a corner, adjusting my stride among jostling shoppers, there it was, the tanned marble riding its mass of limestone arid schist. I’d dodge a packed bus, there it was, at the edge of my field of vision.One night (as we enter narrative time) I was driving with friends back to Athens after a loud dinner in Piraeus and we were lost in some featureless zone when I made a sharp turn into a one-way street, the wrong way, and there it was again, directly ahead, the Parthenon, floodlit for an event, some holiday or just the summer sound-and-light, floating in the dark, a white fire of such clarity and precision I was startled into braking too fast, sending people into the dashboard, the backs of seats.We sat there a moment, considering this vision. It was a street in decline, closed shops and demolition, but the buildings at the far end framed the temple perfectly. Someone in the back seat said something, then a car came toward us, horn blowing. The driver stuck an arm out the window to gesture. Then his head appeared, he started shouting. The structure hung above us like a star lamp. I gazed a moment longer and backed out of the street.I asked Ann Maitland, who sat alongside, what the man had called me.”Masturbator. It’s standard. A Greek will never say anything he hasn’t already said a thousand times.”Her husband Charles reprimanded me for not knowing the word. To Charles it was a mark of one’s respect for other cultures to know the local terms of abuse and the words for sex acts and natural wastes.We three were in the front seat. Behind were David Keller and his new young wife Lindsay and a man named Stock, a Swiss or Austrian located in Beirut, here to do business with David.There was always someone at dinner who was in town to do business with one of the regulars. They tended to be heavyset men, these guests, northern, raw. Eager faces, strong accents. They drank too much and left in the morning.With Ann’s help I worked out our location and headed toward the Caravel, where Stock was staying.”Isn’t it awful?” Lindsay said. “I haven’t been to the Acropolis. Two and a half months, is it, David?””Shut up. They’ll think you’re an idiot.””I’m waiting for my curtains.”I told her she wasn’t the only one who hadn’t been there and tried to explain why I’d been slow to make the pilgrimage.Charles Maitland said, “The thing is there, isn’t it? Climb the hill. Unless it’s some sort of perverse celebrity you’re angling for. The man who turns his back to the peerless summit.””Is that a trace of envy I hear? Grudging admiration?””Climb the hill, James. The thing is right there. It looms. It’s close enough to knock you sideways.”He had a way of feigning gruff impatience. It was a role he found himself comfortable in, being the eldest among us.”That’s just it,” I said. “That’s the point.””What do you mean?” Ann said.”It looms. It’s so powerfully there. It almost forces us to ignore it. Or at least to resist it. We have our self-importance. We also have our inadequacy. The former is a desperate invention of the latter.””I didn’t know you were so deep,” she said.”I’m not normally.””You’ve clearly studied the matter.””The bloody thing has been there for millennia,” Charles said. “Climb the hill, have your look and then descend at an even pace, step by step, placing one foot ahead of the other.””Is it really that easy?”I was beginning to enjoy myself.”I think you ought to grow a beard or shave your head,” Ann said. “We need a physical demonstration of your commitment to these deep ideas. I’m not sure you’re altogether serious. Give us something to believe in. A shaved head would do wonders for this group.”I drove past a sidewalk full of parked cars.”We need a Japanese monk,” she said to Charles, as if this were an answer they’d been seeking.”Shave your head,” Charles told me wearily.”This is why your car is too small for six,” Ann said. “It’s Japanese. Why didn’t we take two cars? Or three?”David Keller, a husky blond Nebraskan of forty or so, said to me earnestly, “Jim, I think what our friends are trying to point out to you, boy, is that you’re a fool, running a fool’s errand, in a fool’s world.””You drive, David. You’re too drunk to talk. Lindsay knows what I mean.””You don’t want to climb it because it’s there,” she said.”Lindsay cuts to the heart of things.””If it weren’t there, you’d climb it.””This woman has a gift,” I said.”We met on a plane,” David said. “Somewhere over the ocean. Middle of the night. Local time.” He was drawing everything out. “She looked so great. In her Pan Am flight socks. You just wanted to hug her, you know? Like an elf. Her hair kind of delectably frazzled. You wanted to give her a brownie and a glass of milk.”When I pulled up at the Caravel we realized Stock was asleep. We got him out easily enough. Then I dropped the others and went home.I was living in a residential area that curls around the lower slopes of Lycabettus Hill. Most of the people I knew were here or nearby. The deep terraces spill over with lantana and jasmine, the views are panoramic, the cafes full of talk and smoke into the early hours. Americans used to come to places like this to write and paint and study, to find deeper textures. Now we do business.I poured myself some soda water and sat outside awhile. From the terrace the city stretched to the gulf in smoky vales and rises, a seamless concrete village. Rare nights, for whatever atmospheric reasons, you could hear planes taking off down by the water. The sound was mysterious, full of anxious gatherings, a charged rumble that seemed a long time in defining itself as something besides a derangement of nature, some onrushing nameless event.The phone rang twice, then stopped.I flew a lot, of course. We all did. We were a subculture, business people in transit, growing old in planes and airports. We were versed in percentages, safety records, in the humor of flaming death. We knew which airline’s food would double you up, which routes connected well. We knew the various aircraft and their configurations and measured this against the distances we were flying. We could distinguish between bad-weather categories and relate them to the guidance system of the plane we were on. We knew which airports were efficient, which were experiments in timelessness or mob rule; which had radar, which didn’t; which might be filled with pilgrims making the hadj. Open seating never caught us by surprise and we were quick to identify our luggage on the runway where that was the practice and we didn’t exchange wild looks when the oxygen masks dropped during touchdown. We advised each other on which remote cities were well maintained, which were notable for wild dogs running in packs at night, snipers in the business district at high noon. We told each other where you had to sign a legal document to get a drink, where you couldn’t eat meat on Wednesdays and Thursdays, where you had to sidestep a man with a cobra when you left your hotel. We knew where martial law was in force, where body searches were made, where they engaged in systematic torture, or fired assault rifles into the air at weddings, or abducted and ransomed executives. This was the humor of personal humiliation.”It is like the Empire,” said Charles Maitland more than once. “Opportunity, adventure, sunsets, dusty death.”Along some northern coast at sundown a beaten gold light is waterborne, sweeping across lakes and tracing zigzag rivers to the sea, and we know we’re in transit again, half numb to the secluded beauty down there, the slate land we’re leaving behind, the peneplain, to cross these rainbands in deep night. This is time totally lost to us. We don’t remember it. We take no sense impressions with us, no voices, none of the windy blast of aircraft on the tarmac, or the white noise of flight, or the hours waiting. Nothing sticks to us but smoke in our hair and clothes. It is dead time. It never happened until it happens again. Then it never happened.

I took a boat in two stages to Kouros, an obscure island in the Cycladic group. My wife and son lived there in a small white house with geraniums in olive oil cans on the roof edge and no hot water. It was perfect. Kathryn was writing reports on the excavation at the south end of the island. Our boy, who was nine, was working on a novel. Everyone is writing away. Everyone is scribbling.When I got there the house was empty. Nothing moved in the streets. It was a hundred degrees, four o’clock, relentless light. I crouched on the roof, hands clasped above my eyes. The village was a model of irregular geometry, the huddled uphill arrangement of whitelime boxes, the street mazes and archways, small churches with blue talc domes. Laundry hung in the walled gardens, always this sense of realized space, common objects, domestic life going on in that sculpted hush. Stairways bent around houses, disappearing.It was a sea chamber raised to the day, to the detailing light, a textured pigment on the hills. There was something artless and trusting in the place despite the street meanders, the narrow turns and ravels. Striped flagpoles and aired-out rugs, houses joined by closed wooden balconies, plants in battered cans, a willingness to share the oddments of some gathering-up. Passageways captured the eye with one touch, a sea green door, a handrail varnished to a nautical gloss. A heart barely beating in the summer heat, and always the climb, the small birds in cages, the framed approaches to nowhere. Doorways were paved with pebble mosaics, the terrace stones were outlined in white.The door was open. I went inside to wait. She’d added a rush mat. Tap’s writing table was covered with lined sheets. It was my second visit to the house and I realized I was scrutinizing the place, something I’d done the first time as well. Was it possible to find in the simple furniture, in the spaces between the faded walls, something about my wife and son that had been hidden from me during our life together in California, Vermont and Ontario?We make you wonder if you are the outsider in this group.The meltemi started blowing, the nagging summer wind. I stood by the window, waiting for them to appear. White water flashed outside the bay. Cats slipped out of hidden places in the rough walls and moved stretching into alleyways. The first of the air booms came rolling across the afternoon, waves from some distant violence, making the floor tremble slightly, window frames creak, causing plaster dust to trickle between abutting walls with an anxious whispering sound. Men were using dynamite to fish.Shadows of empty chairs in the main square. A motorcycle droning in the hills. The light was surgical, it was binding. It fixed the scene before me as a moment in a dream. All is foreground, wordless and bright.They arrived from the site on a motor scooter. Kathryn had a bandanna around her head and wore a tank top over baggy fatigue pants. It was in its way a kind of gritty high fashion. Tap saw me at the window and ran back to tell his mother, who didn’t quite catch herself from looking up. She left the scooter at the edge of a stepped street and they came up toward the house single file.”I stole some yogurt,” I said.”So. Look who’s here.””I’ll pay you back a little at a time. What are you up to, Tap? Helping your mom revise the entire history of the ancient world?”I grabbed him under the arms and lifted him to eye level, making a noise that exaggerated the strain involved. I was always making lionlike noises, rough-housing with my kid. He gave me one of his tricky half smiles and then put his hands squarely on my shoulders and said in his small monotone, “We had a bet when you would come. Five drachmas.””I tried to call the hotel, tried to call the restaurant, couldn’t get through.””I lost,” he said.I gave him a sideways toss and put him down. Kathryn went inside to heat pots of water that she would add to their baths.”I liked the pages you sent. But your concentration fell off once or twice. Your hero went out in a blizzard wearing his rubbery Ingersoll.””What’s wrong with that? It was the heaviest thing he had.That was the point.””I think you meant Mackintosh. He went out in a blizzard wearing his rubbery Mackintosh.””I thought a Mackintosh was a boot. He wouldn’t go out with one Mackintosh. He’d wear Mackintoshes.””He’d wear Wellingtons. A Wellington is a boot.””Then what’s a Mackintosh?””A raincoat.””A raincoat. Then what’s an Ingersoll?””A watch.””A watch,” he said, and I could see him store these names and the objects they belonged to, for safekeeping.”Your characters are good. I’m learning things I didn’t know.””Can I tell you what Owen says about character?””Of course you can tell me. You don’t have to ask permission, Tap.””We’re not sure you like him.””Don’t be cute.”He bobbed his head like a senile man in the street having a silent argument with himself. In his miscellany of gestures and expressions, this one meant he was feeling a little sheepish.”Come on,” I said. “Tell me.””Owen says ‘character’ comes from a Greek word. It means ‘to brand or to sharpen.’ Or ‘pointed stake’ if it’s a noun.””An engraving instrument or branding instrument.””That’s right,” he said.”This is probably because ‘character’ in English not only means someone in a story but a mark or symbol.””Like a letter of the alphabet.””Owen pointed that out, did he? Thanks a lot, Owen.”Tap laughed at my tone of pre-empted father.”You know something?” I said. “You’re beginning to look a little Greek.””No, I’m not.””Do you smoke yet?”He decided he liked this idea and made smoking gestures and talking gestures. He spoke a few sentences in Ob, a coded jargon he’d learned from Kathryn. She and her sisters spoke Ob as children and now Tap used it as a kind of substitute Greek or counter-Greek.Kathryn came out with two handfuls of pistachio nuts for us. Tap cupped his hands and she let one set slowly run out, raising her fist to lengthen the spill. We watched him smile as the nuts clicked into his hands.Tap and I sat cross-legged on the roof. Narrow streets ran down to the square, where men sat against the walls of buildings, under the Turkish balconies, looking wine-stained in the setting sun.We ate our nuts, putting the shell remnants in my breast pocket. Above the far curve of the village was a ruined windmill. The terrain was rocky, dropping steeply to the sea. A woman stepped laughing from a rowboat, turning to watch it rock. The broad motion made her laugh again. There was a boy eating bread at the oars.We watched a deliveryman, powdered white, carry flour sacks on his head into the bakery. He had an empty sack folded over the top of his head to keep flour out of his hair and eyes and he looked like a hunter of white tigers, wearing the skins. The wind was still blowing.I sat inside with Kathryn while the boy took his bath. She kept the room dark, drinking a beer, still in her tank top, the bandanna loose around her neck now.”So. How’s the job coming? Where have you been spending time?””Turkey,” I said. “Pakistan now and then.””I’d like to meet Rowser sometime. No, I wouldn’t.””You’d hate him but in a healthy way. He’d add years to your life. He has a new thing. It’s a briefcase. Looks and feels like a briefcase. Except it has a recording device, a device that detects other recording devices, a burglar alarm, a Mace-spraying device and a hidden tracing transmitter, whatever that is.””Do you hate him in a healthy way?””I don’t hate him at all. Why should I hate him? He gave me the job. The job pays well. And I get to see my family. How would I get to see my little expatriate family if it weren’t for Rowser and his job and his risk assessments?””Is he adding years to your life?””I enjoy it. It’s an interesting part of the world. I feel I’m involved in events. Sure, sometimes I see it from a different perspective. Yours, of course. It’s just insurance. It’s the world’s biggest, richest companies protecting their investments.””Is that my perspective?””Don’t I know what you hate by this time?””There ought to be something higher than the corporation. That’s all.””There’s the orgasm.””You’ve had a long tiring trip.” She drank from the bottle. “I think I distrust the idea of investing, somehow, more than corporations themselves. I keep saying ‘somehow.’ Tap catches me at it. There’s something secret and guilty about investing. Is that a foolish thing to believe? It’s the wrong use of the future.””That’s why they use small print to list stock prices.””Secret and guilty. How’s your Greek?””Terrible. I leave the country for three days and forget everything. I know the numbers.””Numbers are good,” she said. “They’re the best place to start.””At dinner the other night I asked for chicken shit instead of grilled chicken. I got the accent wrong so the waiter didn’t know what I was saying anyway.””How did you know you said chicken shit?””The Maitlands were there. Charles pounced. Are we having dinner?””We’ll go to the quay. Did you get a room?””There’s always a room for me. They fire the cannon when they see my boat rounding the point.”She passed the bottle across to me. She looked tired from her work at the excavation, physically beat, her hands full of marks and cuts, but she was also charged by it, bright with it, giving off static. There must be a type of weariness that seems a blessing of the earth. In Kathryn’s case it was literally the earth she was combing so scrupulously for fire marks and artifacts. I saw nothing in it myself.Her hair was trimmed to the nape and she was brown and a little leathery, wind-seared around the eyes. A lean woman, small-hipped, agile and light in her movements. There was a practicality about her body. She was built to a purpose, one of those padders through rooms, barefoot, in swishing corduroys. She liked to sprawl over furniture, arms dangling, legs stretched across a coffee table. She had a slightly elongated face, sinewy legs, quick deft hands. Old photographs of Kathryn with her father and her sisters showed a directness that caught the camera, engaged it fully. You felt this was a girl who took the world seriously. She expected it to be honest and was determined to be equal to its difficulties and testing times. She gave an unbalancing force and candor to the pictures, especially since her father and sisters customarily wore expressions that were studies in Canadian reserve, except when the old man was soused.Greece, I believed, would be her shaping environment, a place where she might carry on the singleminded struggle she’d always thought life was supposed to be. I mean the word “struggle” as an undertaking, a strenuous personal engagement.”I’d like to take Tap to the Peloponnese with me,” I said. “He’ll love the place. It’s haunted. All those fortified heights, the mist, the wind.””He’s been to Mycenae.””He hasn’t been to Mistra, has he? Or down to the Mani. Or to Nestor’s palace. Honest-hearted Nestor.””No.””He hasn’t been to sandy Pylos, has he?””Relax, James, would you.””Come September, what happens? I think we ought to know where he’s going to school. We ought to be making arrangements right now. When do you stop digging? Where do you plan to spend the winter?””I don’t have plans. We’ll see.””What have you found here anyway?””Some walls. A cistern.””Were the Minoans as bright and gay as we’re led to believe? What have you found besides walls?””It was a small settlement. Some of it’s under water. The sea’s risen since then.””The sea’s risen. No frescoes?””Not a one.””What pickups? Coins, daggers?””Storage jars.””Intact?””Fragments.””Big jars? Big as the ones at Knossos?””Not nearly,” she said.”No frescoes, no silver-inlaid daggers, tiny broken pots. Are the pots unpainted?””Painted.””Dumb luck,” I said.She grabbed the bottle and drank, partly to conceal traces of amusement. Tap came in, a little shiny after his bath.”We have a brand new kid,” she said. “I’d better hurry and take my bath so we can feed him.””If we don’t feed him, he’ll blow away in this wind.””That’s right. He needs ballast. Do you think he knows what ballast is?””He’s writing a prairie epic, not a sea epic, but I think he knows anyway. Five drachmas says he knows.”He turned on a light. I’d arrived expecting him to be changed in appearance. He’d always seemed vaguely delicate to me, small-boned. I thought the open life would transform him physically. There might be something of the wild boy about him. The sun and wind would crack his skin a little, mark up the tidy surface. This unpremeditated life of theirs would break him out of his containment, I thought. But he looked about the same. A little darker, that was all.The essential Thomas Axton now stood before me. Arms crossed on his chest, left foot forward, he spoke in his uninflected manner about ballast in ships. He seemed to be speaking through a hollow stalk. It was the perfect voice for Ob.When Kathryn was ready we walked down to the harborfront. This wasn’t an island abandoned to tourism. It was hard to get to, had one shabby hotel and a few rocky beaches, the best of them inaccessible except by boat. Even in midsummer there were only a couple of orange backpacks propped against the fountain, no wandering shoppers or places to shop. We would eat in one of the two identical restaurants. The waiter would spread the paper covering and drop utensils and bread onto the table. He would bring out grilled meat or fish and a country salad and some wine and a soft drink. Cats would appear under the chairs. The wind would shake the canopy and we would tuck the paper covering under the elastic band beneath the table top. A plastic ashtray, toothpicks in a glass.She preferred satisfactions that were basic. This was Greece to her, the burning wind, and she was loyal to the place and the idea. At the site she worked with trowels, root clippers, dental picks, tweezers, whatever else they used to move dirt and extract objects. Inches a day. Days the same. Stooped in her five-foot trench. At night she wrote reports, made charts, mapped out the soil changes and heated water for her bath and Tap’s.She’d started out washing clothes for the dig director and fieldworkers. She also prepared lunch from time to time and helped clean the house where most of the staff lived. After budget cuts and defections, the director, Owen Brademas, gave her a trench. That’s the kind of operation it was. The director wore bathing trunks and played the recorder.This was her first dig. She had no experience and no degree and was paid nothing. After we split up she’d read the details of this excavation in something called a fieldwork opportunities bulletin. Volunteers accepted. Travel and lodging paid by individual. Field gear provided.It was interesting to see, back then, how progressively certain she became that this was the future. Other jobs she’d had, good ones, jobs she liked, never took hold so powerfully, the way this mere prospect took hold. The event gathered force. I began to understand it wasn’t just a reaction to our separating and I didn’t know how to take this. It’s almost comic, the number of ways in which people can find themselves diminished.Against my lassitude she operated at peak levels. Sold things, gave things away, stored things in people’s garages. It had struck her with the pure light of a major saint’s vision. She would sift dirt on an island in the Aegean.She started learning Greek. She ordered tapes, bought dictionaries, found a teacher. She went through a couple of dozen books on archaeology. Her study and planning were carried on in a fusion of anticipation and controlled rage. The latter had its source in my own living person. Every day made her more certain of my various failings. I compiled a mental list, which I often recited aloud to her, asking how accurate it was in reflecting her grievances. This was my chief weapon of the period. She hated the feeling that someone knew her mind.1. Self-satisfied.2.Uncommitted.3.Willing to settle.4.Willing to sit and stare, conserving yourself for some end-of-life event, like God’s face or the squaring of the circle.$. You like to advertise yourself as refreshingly sane and healthy in a world of driven neurotics. You make a major production of being undriven.6.You pretend.7.You pretend not to understand other people ‘s motives.8.You pretend to be even-tempered. You feel it gives you a moral and intellectual advantage. You are always looking for an advantage.9. You don V see anything beyond your own modest contentment. We all live on the ocean swell of your well-being. Everything else is trivial and distracting, or monumental and distracting, and only an unsporting wife or child would lodge a protest against your teensy-weensy happiness.10. You think being a husband and father is a form of Hitlerism and you shrink from it. Authority makes you uneasy, doesn’t it? You draw back from anything that resembles an official capacity.11. You don’t allow yourself the full pleasure of things.12. You keep studying your son for clues to your own nature.13. You admire your wife too much and talk about it too much. Admiration is your public stance, a form of self-protection if I read it correctly.14. Gratified by your own feelings of jealousy, 15. Politically neuter.16.Eager to believe the worst.17.You will defer to others, you will be acutely sensitive to the feelings of strangers, but you will contrive to misunderstand your family. We make you wonder if you are the outsider in this group.18.You have trouble sleeping, an attempt to gain my sympathy, 19. You sneeze in books.20.You have an eye for your friends’wives. Your wife’s friends. Somewhat speculative, somewhat detached.21.You go to extremes to keep your small mean feelings hidden. Only in arguments do they appear. Completing your revenge. Hiding it even from yourself at times. Not willing to be seen taking your small mean everyday revenge on me, which, granted, I have sometimes abundantly earned. Pretending your revenge is a misinterpretation on my part, a misunderstanding, some kind of accident.22.You contain your love. You feel it but don’t like to show it. When you do show it, it’s the result of some long drawn-out decision-making process, isn ‘t it, you bastard.23.Nurser of small hurts.24.Whiskey sipper.25.Under achiever.26.Reluctant adulterer.27.American.

We came to refer to these as the 27 Depravities, like some reckoning of hollow-cheeked church theologians. Since then I’ve sometimes had to remind myself it was my list, not hers. I think it was a fair analysis of her complaints and I took a self-destructive pleasure in calling out the accusations as if from her own unforgiving heart. Such was my mood those days. I was trying to involve her in my failings, make her see how she exaggerated routine lapses, make her appear shrewish to herself, the bitch of legend.Every day I’d recite a few entries, go into deep meditation, working up new ones, polishing old, and then come back at her with the results. For aggravating effect I’d sometimes use a female voice. It was a week-long operation. Most of the items brought silence. Some made her laugh sarcastically. I had to learn that people who try to be perceptive about themselves are taken for self-hectoring fools, although it’s more accurate to say I was trying to be perceptive about her. The oral delivery was a devotional exercise, an attempt to understand through repetition. I wanted to get inside her, see myself through her, learn the things she knew. Thus Kathryn’s cutting laughter. “Is this what I’m supposed to think of you? Is this the picture I have in my mind? A masterpiece of evasion. This is what you’ve compiled.”What a funhouse mirror is love.By the end of the week I was using a vibrant liturgical voice, sending it toward the distant ceiling of our renovated Victorian house in Toronto’s east end. I sat on the striped sofa in the living room, watching her separate her books from mine (bound for different garages), and I stopped reciting long enough to ask casually, by the way, “What would happen if I followed?”Now, six thousand miles from that cobblestone street, the family sits down to dinner. Ten octopus carcasses hang over a clothesline near our table. Kathryn goes into the kitchen to exchange greetings with the owner and his wife and to look at the heated trays, the meat and vegetables lurking beneath oil slicks.A man standing near the edge of the quay lifts his cane to waggle a warning at some children playing nearby. Tap would use this detail in his novel.

2

owen brademas used to say that even random things take ideal shapes and come to us in painterly forms. It’s a matter of seeing what is there. He saw patterns there, moments in the flow.His pain was radiant, almost otherworldly. He seemed to be in touch with grief, as if it were a layer of being he’d learned how to tap. He expressed things out of it and through it. Even his laughter had a desolate edge. If it was all sometimes too impressive, I never doubted the unsparing nature of whatever it was that haunted his life. Many hours we spent in conversation, the three of us. I used to study Owen, trying to figure him out. He had an unsettling mental force. Everyone was affected by it to one degree or another. I think he made us feel we were among the fortunate ordinary objects of the world. Maybe we thought his ruinous inner life was a form of devastating honesty, something unique and brave, a condition we were lucky to have avoided.Owen was a naturally friendly man, lank, with a long-striding walk. My son enjoyed spending time with him and I was a little surprised at how quickly Kathryn developed a fondness, a warm regard, whatever a woman in her mid-thirties feels toward a sixty-year-old man with a western voice and a long stride.Her eagerness to work amazed and confounded him. She went at it like someone half her age. This was inconsistent with the style of a fading operation. It was a dig that would never be published. From forty people, the first time I visited, they were down to nine. Still, she worked and learned and helped keep things going. I think Owen enjoyed being shamed. He’d emerge from one of his midday swims to find her at the bottom of an abandoned hole, swinging a railroad pick. The high sun funneled in on her, the wind passed over. Everyone else was in the olive grove, eating lunch in the shade. Her attitude was a precious dissonance, something as intimate, pure and unexpected as a moment from his own past, flaring in the mind. I picture him standing at the edge of the pit with a bath towel fastened at the waist, in torn tennis sneakers, breaking out in abandoned laughter, a sound that always struck me as a cue to some deep and complicated passion. Owen yielded himself completely to things.Sometimes we talked half the night. I felt these were useful hours beyond whatever rambling things we found to say. They gave Kathryn and me a chance to speak to each other, see each other, from either side of Owen’s intervening position, in Owen’s refracting light. They were his conversations really. It was mainly Owen who set the tone and traced the subject matter. This was important. What she and I needed was a way to be together without feeling there were issues we had to confront, the bloody leftovers of eleven years. We weren’t the kind of people who have haggard dialogues on marriage. What dulling work, all ego, she would say. We needed a third voice, subjects remote from us. This is why I came to put a high practical value on those conversations. They allowed us to connect through the agency of this wan soul, Owen Brademas.But I don’t want to surrender my text to analysis and reflection. “Show us their faces, tell us what they said.” That’s Owen too, Owen’s voice coursing warmly through a half-dark room. Memory, solitude, obsession, death. Subjects remote, I thought.An old man came with breakfast. I took my coffee out to the small balcony and listened awhile to French voices on the other side of the partition. A white ship crossed in the distance.I saw Tap walking across the square to get me. Sometimes we walked to the site, going the first part of the way along a walled mule path humming with flies. The cab route was roundabout, a dirt road that skirted the higher parts of the island and never lost the sea. It was possible, if you looked to your left about halfway along the route, to get a distant glimpse of a white monastery that seemed to hang from the top of a rock column in the middle of the island.We decided to take the taxi. It was outside the hotel, where it always was, a grayish Mercedes that sagged badly. The roof light was busted and one of the fenders was orange. In ten minutes the driver turned up, sucking his gums. He opened the door. A man was lying across the back seat, asleep. We were all surprised. The driver shouted at the man to wake him up. Then he went through it again to get the man off the seat and out of the cab. He kept talking and shouting as the man wandered off.The taxi smelled of ouzo. We rolled down the windows and settled back. The driver headed along the harborfront, then turned up the last of the streets and went south. It wasn’t until we’d been on the dirt road for five minutes that he said something about the sleeping man. The more he talked, the less irritated he became. As he unraveled the event and analyzed it, he began showing amusement. Whenever he paused to think back on it, he couldn’t help laughing. The event was a funny one after all. He grew more animated and seemed to be relating another incident involving the same man. Tap and I looked at each other. By the time we got to the excavation we were all laughing. Tap was laughing so hard he opened the door and almost tumbled out of the car.There were eighteen trenches extending nearly to the water’s edge. There was an old mining car on a track. Pottery fragments in labeled boxes were kept in a shack with a thatched roof. The watchman was gone but his tent remained.It was a dazed landscape. The sense of spent effort was almost total. What the scientists were leaving behind seemed older to me than what they’d found or hoped to find. The true city was these holes they’d dug, the empty tent. Nothing that was lodged in the scarps could seem more lost or forgotten than the rusted mining car that had once run dirt to the sea.The trench area overlapped an olive grove. Four trenches were in the grove, a head in a straw hat visible in one of them. From our elevated level we could see Kathryn closer to the water and in the sun, stooped over with a trowel. No one else was around. Tap walked on past her, giving a little wave, and went to the shack to wash pottery shards. The other thing he did was collect tools at the end of the day.Kathryn ducked out of sight and for a moment nothing moved in the dancing glare. Only light, sea dazzle, on the calm surface. I realized a mule was standing just inside the olive grove. All over the island donkeys and mules stood motionless, trick figures hidden in the trees. The air was still. I used to long for thunderstorms and bare-legged women. I was twenty-five before I realized stockings were sexy.The same white ship came into view.That night Owen played the recorder for ten or fifteen minutes, a small musing sound that floated over the dark streets. We sat outside the house on a small terrace that faced the wrong way. The sea was behind us, blocked by the house. Tap appeared in the window to tell us he might be going to bed soon. His mother wanted to know if this was a request for silence.”No, I like the recorder.””I’m relieved and grateful,” Owen said. “Sleep well. Pleasant dreams.””Gobood nobight.””Can you say it in Greek?” I said.”Greek-Ob or Greek-Greek?””That might be interesting,” Kathryn said. “Greek-Ob. I never thought of that.”Owen said to Tap, “If your mother ever takes you to Crete, I know a place you might be interested in seeing. It’s in the south-central part of the island, not far from Phaistos. There’s a group of ruins scattered in the groves near a seventh-century basilica. The Italians excavated. They found Minoan figurines, which you already know about. And there are Greek and Roman ruins scattered all over. But the thing you might like best is the code of law. It’s in a Dorian dialect and it’s inscribed on a stone wall. I don’t know if anyone’s counted the words but they’ve counted the letters. Seventeen thousand. The law deals with criminal offenses, land rights and other things. But what’s interesting is that the whole thing is written in a style called boustrophedon. One line is inscribed left to right, the next line right to left. As the ox turns. As the ox plows. This is what boustrophedon means. The entire code is done this way. It’s easier to read than the system we use. You go across a line and then your eye just drops to the next line instead of darting way across the page. Might take some getting used to, of course. Fifth century b.c.”He talked slowly in a rich voice, lightly graveled, a regional chant of drawn-out vowel sounds and other ornaments. His voice carried drama in it, tuneful history. It was easy to understand how a nine-year-old might feel snug in such narrative rhythms.The village was quiet. When Tap turned out his bedside lamp the only visible light was the candle stub burning among our wine glasses and crusts of bread. I felt the day’s glassy heat under my skin.”What are your plans?” I said to Owen.They both laughed.”I withdraw the question.””I’m maneuvering long-distance,” he said. “We may be able to finish the field season. After that, your guess is as good as mine.””No plans to teach?””I don’t think I want to go back. Teach what? To whom?” He paused. “I’ve come to think of Europe as a hardcover book, America as the paperback version.” Laughing, clasping his hands. “I’ve given myself over to the stones, James. All I want to do is read the stones.””Greek stones, I assume you mean.””I’ve been sneaking up on the Mideast. And I’m teaching myself Sanskrit. There’s a place in India I want to see. A kind of Sanskrit pavilion. Extensive inscriptions.””What kind of book is India?””Not a book at all, I suspect. That’s what scares me.””Everything scares you,” Kathryn said.”Masses of people scare me. Religion. People driven by the same powerful emotion. All that reverence, awe and dread. I’m a boy from the prairie.””I’d like to go to Tinos sometime soon.””Lord you’re crazy,” he said. “The Virgin’s feast?””Pilgrims by the thousands,” she said. “Mostly women, I understand.””Crawling on hands and knees.””I didn’t know that.””Hands and knees,” he said. “Also in stretchers, in wheelchairs, carrying canes, blind, bandaged, crippled, diseased, muttering.”She laughed, saying, “I’d like to see it.””I’d be inclined to give it a miss myself,” I said.”I’d really like to go. Things like that have great force, somehow. I imagine it must be beautiful.””Don’t expect to get anywhere near the place,” he told her. “Every square foot is given over to crawling and supplication. Hotel space is nonexistent and the boats will be jam-packed.””I know what disturbs you two. They’re white people, they’re Christians. It’s not all that remote from your own experience.””I have no experience,” I said.”You went to church.””As a child.””Doesn’t that count? I’m only saying that’s not the Ganges they’re swarming into. On some level it touches you in disturbing ways.””I can’t agree,” Owen said. “My own experience as a bystander, an occasional observer, is totally, totally different. Campus-brand Catholicism, for instance. Well-lighted space, bare altar, open faces, communal handshaking. None of these smoking lamps, these dark sinuous images. This is gilded theater, what we see here. We’re almost off the map.””You’re not a Catholic,” I said.”No.””What are you, what were you?”The question seemed to confuse him.”I had an odd upbringing. My people were devout in not very conventional ways, although I guess I’m obliged to think that convention depends on cultural surroundings.”Kathryn changed the subject for him.”Something I meant to tell you, Owen. About two weeks ago, a Saturday, remember we broke up early. Tap and I came back here, he took a nap, I lugged a chair up to the roof, sat drying my hair, going over notes. Nothing stirred down there. About ten minutes into my reading a man came out of the shadows somewhere in the lower village. He walked over to a motorcycle on the wharf. Crouched over it, inspecting this or that surface. Out of nowhere a second man showed up. Didn’t even nod at the first man, didn’t see him as far as I could tell. There was another motorcycle at the other end of the wharf. The second man stood straddling his bike. The first man moved into similar position. I could see both men, they couldn’t see each other. They kick-started their bikes at the same instant, Owen, precisely, and went roaring off in opposite directions, up into the hills, two streams of dust. I’m convinced neither of them even heard the other.””How lovely,” he said.”Then silence again. Two lines of dust vanishing in the air.””You could see the event shaping itself.””Yes, there was a tension. I saw the elements begin to fit. The way the second man walked to the other end of the wharf. The clear shadows.””And then it disintegrated, literally, in dust.”Owen lapsed into thought, as he often did, stretching his legs, pushing the chair back against the wall. He had a tapered face with large shocked eyes. His hair was sparse. Pale brows, a bald spot. Sometimes his shoulders seemed cramped in the long narrow frame.”But we’re still in Europe, aren’t we?” he said, and I took this to be a reference to some earlier point. He came out of these thoughtful pauses saying things that weren’t always easy to fit into the proper frame. “No matter how remote you are, how far into the mountains or islands, how deep-ended you are, how much you want to disappear, there is still the element of shared culture, the feeling that we know these people, come from these people. Something beyond this is familiar as well, some mystery. Often I feel I’m on the edge of knowing what it is. It’s just beyond reach, something that touches me deeply. I can’t quite get it and hold it. Does anyone know what I mean?”No one knew.”But on the subject of balance, Kathryn, we see it here every day, although not quite as you’ve described. This is one of those Greek places that pits the sensuous against the elemental. The sun, the colors, the sea light, the great black bees, what physical delight, what fertile slow-working delight. Then the goatherd on the barren hill, the terrible wind. People must devise means to collect rainwater, buttress their houses against earthquakes, cultivate on steep rocky terrain. Subsistence. A deep silence. There’s nothing here to soothe or refresh the landscape, no forests or rivers or lakes. But there’s light and sea and sea birds, there’s heat that rots ambition and stuns the intellect and will.”The extravagance of the remark surprised him. He laughed abruptly, in a way that welcomed us to share a joke at his expense. When he finished his wine he sat upright, legs drawn in.”Correctness of detail. This is what the light provides. Look to small things for your truth, your joy. This is the Greek specific.”Kathryn put down her glass.”Tell James about the people in the hills,” she said, and in she went, yawning.I wanted to follow her to the bedroom, lift her out of the sailcloth skirt. So much stale time to sweep aside. Jasmine budding in a toothbrush glass, all the senses rush to love. We nudge our shoes away and touch lightly, in shivers, feeling each other with an anxious reverence, alert to every nuance of contact, fingertips, floating bodies. Dip and lift again, arms around her buttocks, my face in the swale of her breasts. I groan with the burden, she laughs in the night wind. A parody of ancient abduction. Tasting the salt moisture between her breasts. Thinking as I lumber toward the bed how rhythmic and correct this beauty is, this simple thing of curves, human surfaces, the shape those island Greeks pursued in their Parian marble. Noble thought. The bed is small and set low, a swayback mattress hard at the edges. In time our breathing finds the same waver, the little cadence we will work to demolish. Some clothes slip off the chair, belt buckle ringing. That gaze of hers. Wondering who I am and what I want. The look in the dark I’ve never been able to answer. The look of the girl in the family album who asserts her right to calculate the precise value of what is out there. We take care to be silent. The boy in his own bed on the other side of the wall. This stricture is seamed so evenly into our nights we’ve come to believe there would be less pleasure without it. From the beginning, when he was taking shape in her, we tried to guide ourselves away from forceful emotions. It seemed a duty and a preparation. We would make ready a well-tempered world, murmurous, drawn in airy pastels. Noble thought number two. My mouth at the rim of her ear, all love’s words unvoiced. This silence is a witness to broader loyalties.”It started simply enough,” Owen said. “I wanted to visit the monastery. There’s a trail that meanders in that general direction, barely wide enough for a motor scooter. It cuts through a vineyard, then climbs into the dusty hills. As the terrain rises and drops, you get intermittent views of those rock masses farther inland. The monastery is occupied, it’s a working monastery according to local people, and visitors are welcome. The trouble with the path is that it disappears in thick shrubbery and rockfall about two miles from the destination. No choice but walk. I left the machine and started off. From the end of the path it’s not possible to see the monastery or even the huge rock column it’s attached to, so I found myself trying to reconstruct the terrain from those hurried glimpses I’d had a quarter of an hour earlier, on the scooter.”I could see her in the dark, moving along the bedroom wall, taking off her blouse as she went. The window was small and she passed quickly from view. A dim flash, the bathroom light. She closed the door. The sound of running water came from the other side of the house, where the toilet window was, like the sputter of something frying. Dark again. Owen tipped his chair against the wall.”There are caves along the way. Some of them looked to me like tomb caves, similar to the ones at Matala on the Libyan Sea. There are caves everywhere in Greece, of course. A definitive history is waiting to be written of cave habitation in this part of the world. It amounts to a parallel culture, I would imagine, right up to the nudists and hippies on Crete in recent years. I wasn’t surprised, then, to see two figures, male, standing at the entrance to one of these caves, about forty-five feet above me. The hills have a greenish cast here, most of them are rounded at the top. I hadn’t yet reached the pinnacle rocks, where the monastery is. I pointed ahead and asked these men in Greek if this was the way to the monastery. The odd thing is that I knew they weren’t Greek. I felt instinctively it would be to my advantage to play dumb. Very strange, how the mind makes these calculations. Something about them. A haggard look, intense, fugitive. I didn’t think I was in danger, exactly, but I felt I needed a tactic. / am harmless, a lost traveler. There I was, after all, in walking shoes and a sun hat, a little canvas bag on my back. Thermos bottle, sandwiches, chocolate. There were crude steps cut into the rock. Not at all recent. The men wore old shabby loose-fitting clothes. Faded colors mostly, Turkish sort of pants, or Indian, what younger travelers sometimes wear. You see them in Athens around cheap hotels in the Plaka and in places like the covered market in Istanbul and anywhere along the overland route to India, people in ashram clothes, drawstring clothes. One of the men had a scraggly beard and he was the one who called down to me, in Greek more halting than my own, ”How many languages do you speak?’ Strangest damn thing to ask. A formal question. Some medieval tale, a question asked of travelers at the city gates. Did my entry depend on the answer? The fact that we’d spoken to each other in a language not our own deepened the sense of formal procedure, of manner and ceremony. I called up, ‘Five,’ again in Greek. I was intrigued but still wary and when he beckoned me up I took the steps slowly, wondering what people, for how many centuries, had lived in this place.”I had to concentrate to see her. Back in the bedroom, by the wall, in darkness. I tried to induce her to look this way by an act of will. She’d put on a chamois cloth shirt, one of my discards, good for sleeping alone, she’d told me smiling. An overlong garment, tailored in the old-fashioned way, it reached almost to her knees. I waited for her to see me staring in. I knew she’d look.This knowing was contained in the structure of my own seeing. We both knew. It was an understanding between us that bypassed the usual centers. I might even have predicted within a fraction of a second when her head would turn. And she did look up, briefly, one knee already lowered to the edge of the bed, and what she saw was Owen’s elbow jutting across the window frame from his position in the tipped-back chair, Owen talking, and beyond this the spare calm educated face of her husband, violent in candlelight. I wanted a sign, something to interpret as favorable. But what could she give me in a crowded moment in the dark even if she knew my mind and wanted to ease it? That was the shirt she was wearing when she took a swipe at me with a potato peeler in one of the first of the dark days, our bird bath covered with snow.Reluctant adulterer.“There were two others near the cave entrance. One a woman, strong-featured, heavy, with cropped hair. The man was sitting just inside the entrance writing in a notebook. There was a stone fireplace nearby. Inside the cave I saw sleeping bags, knapsacks, straw mats, other things that didn’t register clearly. The people were filthy, of course. Hair stringy with dirt. That particular clinging dirt of people who no longer notice. Dirt was their medium by now. It was their air, their nightly warmth. We sat outside the cave mouth on ledges, carved steps, rolled-up sleeping bags. One of the men pointed out the monastery, which was clearly visible from here. I decided to accept this as a friendly and reassuring gesture and tried not to notice the way they were studying me, inspecting minutely. We spoke Greek throughout, their version of it a mixture of older forms and demotikí, or what people actually speak.”He told them he was involved in epigraphy, his first and current love, the study of inscriptions. He went off on private expeditions, leaving the Minoan dig to his assistant. He’d recently come back from Qasr Hallabat, a ruined desert castle in Jordan, where he’d seen the fragmented Greek inscriptions known as the Edict of Anastasius. Before that he’d been to Tell Mardikh to study the Ebla tablets; to Mount Nebo to see the pavement mosaics; to Jerash, Palmyra, Ephesus. He told them he’d gone to Ras Shamrah in Syria to inspect a single clay tablet, about the size of a man’s middle finger, that contained the entire thirty-letter alphabet of the Canaanite people who lived there well over three thousand years ago.They seemed excited by this, although no one referred to it until Owen was getting set to leave. He thought in fact they were trying to conceal their excitement. As he talked further about Ras Shamrah they were very still, they were careful not to look at each other. But he sensed an interaction, a curious force in the air, as though each of them sat in a charged field and these fields had begun to overlap. It turned out in the end they were interested in the alphabet. They explained this to him almost shyly in their defective Greek.Not Ras Shamrah. Not history, gods, tumbled walls, the scale poles and pumps of the excavators.The alphabet itself. They were interested in letters, written symbols, fixed in sequence.

Tap washed pottery shards in pans of water, scrubbing them with a toothbrush. The more delicate pieces he cleaned with a small paintbrush, fine-bristled.Kathryn and a male student worked a device called a rocking screen. The young man troweled dirt from a tall pile into a plastic bleach bottle with the upper section cut off. He spread this dirt onto a horizontal screen equipped with handles and held in position at elbow height by a bracketed wooden framework. Kathryn gripped the handles and rocked the dirt through the fine mesh, one hour, two hours, three hours.I sat in the shade, watching.

At twilight she and I walked down through the village to one of the fishing boats tied up at the pier. A small crucifix was nailed to the door of the wheelhouse. We sat on deck and watched people eating dinner in the two restaurants. She knew the owner of the boat and his sons. One of the sons had worked at the excavation, helping to clear the site and then digging trenches. The other son was limited in the work he could do, having lost a hand to dynamite.This second man stood about thirty yards away, beating an octopus against a rock. The small beach where he stood was littered with broken things and thick plastic sheeting. He held the octopus by the head and smashed its tentacles against the rock, over and over.”I had an erotic fantasy last night while Owen was talking about those people.””Who was in it?” she said.”You and I.””A man who has fantasies about his wife?””I’ve always been backward in these matters.””It must be the sun. The heat and sun are famous for generating this kind of thing.””It was nighttime,” I said.We talked awhile about her nephews and nieces, other family matters, commonplaces, a cousin taking trumpet lessons, a death in Winnipeg. It seemed we could stray from Owen’s evening seminars. We could talk to each other behind his back, as it were, as long as we didn’t get too close to the basic state of things between us. The subject of family makes conversation almost tactile. I think of hands, food, hoisted children. There’s a close-up contact warmth in the names and images. Everydayness. She had one sister in England, two in western Canada, people in six provinces altogether, Sinclairs and Pattisons and their extensions in insulated houses with aluminum siding at the back and half a cord of wood stacked against the sides. This is life below the white line, the permafrost. People sitting in renovated kitchens, decent, sad, a little bitter in an undirected way. I felt I knew them. Bass fishermen. Presbyterians.When children race out of rooms the noise of their leaving remains behind. When old people die, she’d once been told, they leave a smell on things.”My father hated that hospital. He’d always feared doctors and hospitals. He never wanted to know what was wrong. All those tests, that whole year of tests, I began to think he would die of tests. He preferred not knowing. But once they put him in the hospital, he knew.””He needed a drink. He kept telling me. It became a complicated joke between us.””Many drinks.””I wish he could have gone to this subterranean place in Athens I sometimes go to with David Keller. When someone asks whether they have bourbon, the bartender says smugly, ‘Yes, of course, James Beam, very good.’‘”James Beam. That is very good. He liked his bourbon.””He liked American things.””A common failing.””Despite the propaganda he kept hearing from one of his children.””Four years now, isn’t it?””Four years. And that incredible thing he said near the end. ‘I commute all sentences. Pass the word. The criminals are forgiven.’ Which I will never forget.””He could barely speak.””Deadpan. Absolutely deadpan to the end.”This talk we were having about familiar things was itself ordinary and familiar. It seemed to yield up the mystery that is part of such things, the nameless way in which we sometimes feel our connections to the physical world. Being here. Everything is where it should be. Our senses are collecting at the primal edge. The woman’s arm trailing down a shroud, my wife, whatever her name. I felt I was in an early stage of teenage drunkenness, lightheaded, brilliantly happy and stupid, knowing the real meaning of every word. The deck gave off a dozen smells.”Why is Tap writing about rural life during the Depression?””He talks to Owen. I think it’s interesting that he writes about real people instead of heroes and adventurers. Not that he doesn’t go overboard in other ways. Flamboyant prose, lurid emotions. He absolutely collides with the language. The spelling is atrocious.””He talks to Owen.””I gather these are episodes from Owen’s boyhood. People he knew and so on. I don’t think Owen even knows this stuff is being put on paper. It’s an interesting story, at least as it emerges from our son’s feverish imagination.””A nonfiction novel.”A man finishing a peach tossed the pit into the sidecar of a motorcycle as it turned the corner where he happened to be standing. The timing was perfect, the toss deceptively casual. What rounded out the simple beauty of the thing was the fact that he did not look around to see who noticed.”I hope we don’t become one of those couples who start getting along after they split up.””That may be better,” she said, “than not getting along at all.””I hope we don’t become one of those couples who can’t live together but can’t live apart.””You’re getting funny in your old age. People have commented.””Who?””No one.””We got along, didn’t we, in the important ways? Our attachment is deep.””No more marriage, ever, for this lady, to anyone.””It’s strange. I can talk about these things with other people. But not with you.””I’m the killer bitch, remember?”Another man had joined the first, the boat owner’s son. They stood on the narrow gravel beach, in the light of the second restaurant, each beating an octopus against the rock, taking turns, working to a rhythm.”What’s next?””Istanbul, Ankara, Beirut, Karachi.””What do you do on these trips?””Policy updates, we call them. In effect I review the political and economic situation of the country in question. We have a complex grading system. Prison statistics weighed against the number of foreign workers. How many young males unemployed. Have the generals’ salaries been doubled recently. What happens to dissidents. This year’s cotton crop or winter wheat yield. Payments made to the clergy. We have people we call control points. The control is always a national of the country in question. Together we analyze the figures in the light of recent events. What seems likely? Collapse, overthrow, nationalization? Maybe a balance of payments problem, maybe bodies hurled into ditches. Whatever endangers an investment.””Then you pay.””It’s interesting because it involves people, waves of people, people running in the streets.”A donkey stood motionless in the back of a three-wheel pickup that was parked near the bakery. A man sat smoking at the wheel.Twin boys, teenagers, walked with their father along the harborfront. The man wore a suit and tie, his sons wore knitted V-neck sweaters. He walked between them and each boy held him by an arm. They walked in a measured stately way, beautiful to watch. The boys were closer to eighteen than thirteen. They were dark and somber and looked straight ahead.Tap was at his desk, writing.

In the room I put things in my overnight bag, planning to be on the early boat to Naxos, on to Piraeus from there. I heard someone whistling outside. A single birdlike note, repeated. I went out to the balcony. Two men played backgammon at a folding table set against the hotel wall. Owen Brademas stood under a tree across the street, looking up at me, arms crossed on his chest.”I went up to the house.””They’re asleep,” I said.”I thought you’d all be up there.””She’s up at five tomorrow. We both are.””It isn’t necessary for her to be at the site so damn early.””She has to heat water and make breakfast and do fourteen other things. She writes letters, she reads. Come on up.”There were five or six other villages on the island. Owen lived just outside the southernmost of these in a concrete dwelling called He dig house. It was located about a mile from the excavation. His assistant and the remaining fieldworkers also lived there. People in the houses scattered along the route from this village to that one must have wondered at the night-riding man sitting tall and awkward on his motor scooter, passing between the barley fields, the bamboo windbreaks.I used a towel to clean off the chair on the balcony and then I carried out a spindle chair with an upholstered seat. Intermittent wind came biting up off the water.”Is this an imposition, James? Just say so.””It’ll be another hour or two before I’m ready to sleep. Sit down.””Do you sleep?””Not as well as I used to.””I don’t sleep,” he said.”Kathryn sleeps. I used to sleep. Tap sleeps, of course.””It’s pleasant here. Our house isn’t well sited. It seems to catch and retain heat.””What is it you find on those stones, Owen, that’s so intriguing?”He stretched his body, easing into an answer.”At first, years ago, I think it was mainly a question of history and philology. The stones spoke. It was a form of conversation with ancient people. It was also riddle-solving to a certain degree. To decipher, to uncover secrets, to trace the geography of language in a sense. In my current infatuation I think I’ve abandoned scholarship and much of the interest I once had in earlier cultures. What the stones say, after all, is often routine stuff. Inventories, land sale contracts, grain payments, records of commodities, so many cows, so many sheep. I’m not an expert on the origin of writing but it seems to be the case that the first writing was motivated by a desire to keep accounts. Palace accounts, temple accounts. Bookkeeping.””And now?””Now I’ve begun to see a mysterious importance in the letters as such, the blocks of characters. The tablet at Ras Shamrah said nothing. It was inscribed with the alphabet itself. I find this is all I want to know about the people who lived there. The shapes of their letters and the material they used. Fire-hardened clay, dense black basalt, marble with a ferrous content. These things I lay my hands against, feel where the words have been cut. And the eye takes in those beautiful shapes. So strange and reawakening. It goes deeper than conversations, riddles.””Why do you call this an infatuation?””Well it just is, James. It’s an unreasoning passion. It’s extravagant, foolish, probably short-lived.”All this with sweeping gestures, in open vocal rhythms. Then he laughed, although it may be more accurate to say he “laughed out,” as one cries out or calls out. So much that he said and did had a tone of trustful surrender to it. It was my guess that he lived with the consequences of self-discovery and I suspected this was a more exacting hardship than anything the world might have worked out for him.”And these people in the hills. You’ll go back?””I don’t know. They talked about moving on.””There’s a practical element. What they eat, where they get it.””They steal,” he said. “Everything from olives to goats.””Did they tell you this?””I surmised.””Would you call them a cult?””They share an esoteric interest.””Or a sect?””You may have a point. I got the impression they’re part of a larger group but I don’t know if their ideas or customs are refinements of some wider body of thought.””What else?” I said.Nothing. The moon was nearly full, lighting the edges of wind-driven clouds. The backgammon players rolled their ivory dice. The board was still there in the morning, set at the edge of the table, as I hurried toward the gray boat, low-riding in the calm, looking sad, half sunken. I prepared to work through the Greek lettering on the bow in my laborious preschool way but it was an easy name this time, after the island. Kouros. It was Tap who’d told me the name of the island derived from a colossal statue found toppled near an ancient gravesite about a hundred years ago. It was a traditional kouros, a sturdy young man with braided hair who stood with his arms close to his nude body, his left foot forward, an archaic smile on his face. Seventh century b.c. He’d learned this from Owen, of course.

3

awake. The pulsing cry of doves. I have to concentrate to form a sense of whereabouts. Up, into the world, crank the shutters open. The beekeeper in the garden of the British School marches in his hooded bonnet to the box hives. I take the coffee mug from the drain basket, set the water boiling. Mount Hymettus is a white shadow, summer mornings, a vaporous reach to the gulf. Today’s a market day, a man is chasing peaches down the steep street below the terrace restaurants. A pickup has hit his, knocking a bushel off the end, and the peaches come down the asphalt surface in wobbling rows. The man is trying to head them off, running low to the ground and making sweeping motions with his arm. A boy stands under the mulberry trees, hosing down the floor of the restaurants. Where the pickups have met, a vast gesturing goes on between the driver of one vehicle and a friend of the stooped and running man. An envelope of Nescafe, a leftover donut. The phone is ringing, the first of the day’s wrong numbers. Doves lighting on the still tips of cypresses. The men from the café around the corner come into view, watching the peaches roll. They lean into the street with care, evaluating gravely, prepared to extend only so much in effort and gesture. Honeybees rise clustered in the dusty light.I walk to the office, where I make myself another cup of coffee and wait for the telex to address me.

Marriage is something we make from available materials. In this sense it’s improvised, it’s almost offhand. Maybe this is why we know so little about it. It’s too inspired and quicksilver a thing to be clearly understood. Two people make a blur.Charles Maitland and I discussed this, sitting on a bench in the National Gardens, where it was fifteen degrees cooler than in the bright city around us. Kids walked by, eating rings of sesame bread.”You’re talking about modern marriage. Americans.””Kathryn is Canadian.””New World then.””I think you’re out of touch.””Of course I’m out of touch. And a good thing too. Spare me from being in touch. The point is that the thing you describe has nothing to do with wedlock. “He produced the word like a gold coin between his teeth. Handsome battered face. Burst capillaries, streaked blue eyes. He was fifty-eight, a half shambles, broad, ruddy, silver-browed, racked by fits of coughing. Sundays he drove alone to a field outside the city and flew his radio-controlled model plane. It weighed nine pounds and cost two thousand dollars.”True,” I said. “Wedlock was the last thing Kathryn and I thought we’d entered. We hadn’t entered a state at all. If anything, we’d broken out of states and nations and firm designs. She used to say this marriage is a movie. She didn’t mean it wasn’t real. The whole thing flickered. It was a series of small flickering moments. But at the same time calm and safe. A day-to-day life. Restrained, moderate. I thought if you didn’t want anything, your marriage was bound to work. I thought the trouble was that everyone wanted. They wanted in different directions. Tap, coming along, reinforced the feeling that we were making it up day by day, little by little, but sanely, contentedly, with no huge self-seeking visions.””I’m thirsty,” he said.”A drink would kill you.””It flickered. It was a series of flickers. You were calm and safe.””We had incredible fights.””When the old girl gets here, we’re going for a drink.””I’m having lunch with Rowser. Come along.””Christ, no. Christ, not him.””Be a sport,” I said.Shaded paths. Watercourses and stone fountains. A dense green place with towering trees that provided a fan vaulting, a cover against the enlarged-heart panics of central Athens. The landscape had a pleasing randomness. It was an enticement to wander foolishly, to get lost without feeling you were part of a formalist puzzle, a garden of hedge traps and designed escapes. A dozen men talked politics under a pine tree. Intermittently Charles listened, translating for me. He and Ann had been married twenty-nine years (she was seven or eight years younger than he was). In that time he’d held various jobs involving the security of overseas branches of British and American corporations. He now worked on a consulting basis, advising mainly on fire safety, something of a drop in status and income, considering the living to be made in terror.They’d lived in Egypt, Nigeria, Panama, Turkey, Cyprus, East Africa, the Sudan and Lebanon. These stays were anywhere from one year to four. They’d lived elsewhere, including the States, for shorter periods, and they’d been through a number of things, from house arrest and deportation, Cairo ‘56, to heavy shelling and infectious hepatitis, Beirut ‘76. Ann talked about these episodes in a tone of remote sadness, as if they were things she’d heard about or read in the newspaper. Maybe she felt unqualified to share the emotions of the native-born. The Lebanese were the victims, Beirut was the tragedy, the world was the loser. She never mentioned what they themselves had lost in any of the places they’d lived. It was Charles, finally, who told me that everything in their small home in Cyprus had been stolen or destroyed when the Turks rolled over the countryside and he implied this was only one of several ruinous events. They’d seemed, the troops, to have a deep need to pull things out of walls, whatever was jutting—pipes, taps, valves, switches. The walls themselves they’d smeared with shit.There was a protocol of coping, of making do, and Ann was expert. I was learning that reticence was fairly common in such matters. There was a sense in which people felt it was self-incriminating to speak out against these violations. I thought I sometimes detected in people who had lost property or fled, most frequently in Americans, some mild surprise that it hadn’t happened sooner, that the men with the six-day beards hadn’t come much earlier to burn them out, or uproot the plumbing, or walk off with the prayer rugs they’d bargained for in the souk and bought as investments—for the crimes of drinking whiskey, making money, jogging in shiny suits along the boulevards at dusk. Wasn’t there a sense, we Americans felt, in which we had it coming?Port Harcourt, Nigeria, Ann said, was the only real regret. There was sweet crude in the delta, a howling loneliness. Charles was doing security and safety for a refinery built by Shell and British Petroleum. She fled to Beirut and the war in the streets. The marriage lost some of its conviction but made eventual gains in the category of rueful irony when BP’s assets were nationalized.They didn’t want to go back home. Too many years of elaborate skies, lithe people with plaited hair, red-robed, in bare feet. Or was that England today? They thought they might retire to California, where they had a son in graduate school, some kind of raving savant by the sound of it—a mathematician.”The idea is to learn the language,” Charles said, “but not to let them know. This is what I do. I don’t let people know unless absolutely pressed.””But then what good is it?””I listen. I listen all the time. I pick up things, listening. I have an advantage in this regard. I’m not only a foreigner. I don’t look as if I speak Greek.””This is an incredible distinction, Charles. Are you serious?””You want to pick up whatever you can.””But don’t you do business here occasionally?””One does business in English. Surely you’ve come to suspect this.””If I ever learn the language, I’ll speak it as often as possible. I want to talk to them, I want to hear what they’re saying. These men arguing, there’s something serious, almost loving about it. I want to interrupt, ask questions.””You won’t pick up anything, talking to them.””I don’t want to pick up anything.””Using my method, you’ll learn infinitely more.””Charles, your method is crazy.””What about a Heineken then? Is it possible in this country to get beer in green bottles?””Seriously, do you speak Arabic?””Of course.””I envy that. I really do.””Ann’s a brilliant linguist. She’s done translation, you know. She’s very good.””My kid speaks Ob. It’s a kind of pig Latin. You insert o-b in certain parts of words.”Charles hunched forward, his cigarette burning to the filter.”Something almost loving,” he mumbled, glancing at the men around the tree.”You know what I mean. There’s a certain quality in the language.””You want to interrupt. You want to ask questions.”I watched Ann cross to us, emerging from a ring of poplars. A gait with a pleasing sway. Even at a distance, her mouth showed the small pursed conceit of a remark in the making. We stood, flanking her, and headed down a path toward the nearest gate.”At any given time,” she said, “half the women in Athens are having their hair done by the other half.””They’ve worked wonders, clearly,” Charles said.”It is such confusion. I’d still be there had it not been for no-shows and dropouts. James, I’ve never realized. You have khaki hair.””It’s brown.””If jeeps had hair, it would look like yours. He has khaki hair,” she told Charles.”Leave him alone. He’s having lunch with George Rowser.””He’s having lunch with us. Where are we off to?””We’ll have dinner,” I said.”Good. Shall I call anyone?””Call everyone.””What are all these people doing in the park?” she said. “Greeks hate fresh air.”

I pulled down a book on mythology for Tap. I took it to the cash register. The woman there directed me to a man across the room. I gave him the book and followed him to his little desk. He took a thick pad, wrote out a sales slip and gave it to me, without the book. I took the sales slip to the woman at the cash register. She took my money, stamped the slip and gave it back to me with my change. I put the stamped document in my pocket and went to the little desk. The man had wrapped the book and was sealing the package with transparent tape. He wanted my sales slip. I took it out of my pocket and gave it to him. He gave me a carbon copy. I put it in my pocket and left with the neatly wrapped book.My life was full of routine surprises. One day I was watching runners from Marathon dodge taxis near the Athens Hilton, the next I was turning a corner in Istanbul to see a gypsy leading a bear on a leash. I began to think of myself as a perennial tourist. There was something agreeable about this. To be a tourist is to escape accountability. Errors and failings don’t cling to you the way they do back home. You’re able to drift across continents and languages, suspending the operation of sound thought. Tourism is the march of stupidity. You’re expected to be stupid. The entire mechanism of the host country is geared to travelers acting stupidly. You walk around dazed, squinting into fold-out maps. You don’t know how to talk to people, how to get anywhere, what the money means, what time it is, what to eat or how to eat it. Being stupid is the pattern, the level and the norm. You can exist on this level for weeks and months without reprimand or dire consequence. Together with thousands, you are granted immunities and broad freedoms. You are an army of fools, wearing bright polyesters, riding camels, taking pictures of each other, haggard, dysenteric, thirsty. There is nothing to think about but the next shapeless event.One day I went out to find the streets full of children wearing costumes. I didn’t know what the occasion was, what was being commemorated. In the center of Athens there were hundreds of these children in elaborate masquerade. They walked hand in hand with their parents or ran among the pigeons in front of the war memorial. Children as cowboys, elves, moonwalkers, oil sheiks with black beards, toting briefcases. I didn’t ask what it meant. I was happy not knowing. I wanted to preserve the surprise in an opaque medium. This happened many times in large and small ways. Athens was my legal home but I wasn’t ready to give up tourism, even here.In the flower market I saw a priest and a deacon come out of the church behind the stalls, leading a group of people who carried crosses and other objects. The priest had wild eyes and a flaring beard, the people may have been mourners. They walked once around the church and went back inside.To be taken constantly by surprise was not the worst thing that could happen to a man living apart.

Rowser traveled under a false name. He had a total of three identities and owned the relevant paper. His office outside Washington was equipped with a letter-bomb detector, a voice scrambler, an elaborate system to prevent break-ins. He was a man who never quite took the final heavy step into foolishness and pathos, despite the indications. His life itself was the chief indication, full of the ornaments of paranoia and deception. Even his hoarse voice, a forced whisper, seemed a comic symptom of the clandestine environment. But Rowser’s massive drive, his will to see things through, overpowered everything else.He was a businessman. He sold insurance to other businessmen. The subjects were money, politics and force.I met him in the bar off the lobby of the Grande Bretagne, one of the duskier haunts, plush chairs, soft voices. He was a stocky man with glasses, going bald. He was drinking mineral water and making notes when I walked in.”Sit down. I’m back from Kuwait.””Are they killing Americans?””Not so you’d notice,” he said. “Not openly. What have you got for me?””George, can I order a drink?””Order a drink.””Turkey is an education in how far people will go to make a point. Except no one agrees on what the point is.””What else is new?””The weather was good.””Did you go to the mosques?””Not this trip,” I said.”I can’t understand how people go to Istanbul and don’t do the mosques. I can spend hours in one mosque.””I was there on business, George.””Very good. But you can always make time for a mosque.””Are you religious?””Get away from me. I like the awe, that’s all.””Impressive architecture. I concede that much.””No pictures. I have entree to Vatican pictures no one gets in to see without stunning credentials. I want to see the stuff in Naples. The hidden rooms.””Who do you know?””I have a cardinal in the States.”The waiter came, head tilted, a faintly mocking look in his eyes. I ordered a beer. Rowser’s ultra-secure briefcase sat next to him in the soft chair. It was full of painstaking assessments, I was sure. Data on the stability of the countries he’d been visiting. Facts on the infrastructure. Probabilities, statistics. These were the music of Rowser’s life, the only coherence he needed.What connected us was risk.He’d started in this line of work by gathering material for people who wrote scholarly reports on large-scale death and destruction. Rowser had a gift for numbers and a temperament that enabled him to separate mathematical techniques and actuarial science from the terrifying events he culled for his figures. In universities and research centers he attended any number of conferences at which people discussed such choice calamities as reactor meltdowns, runaway viruses and three-day spasm wars.Somebody had to tell us what our chances were. Rowser’s problem was that he didn’t have the breadth and penetration to succeed as a risk analyst. He knew what he was, a night-school hustler, a man who figured the angles, brusque, enterprising, chained to late nights and caffeine. He was no game theorist or geopolitician. He had no system of assumptions and principles. What he had was a set of interlocking facts he’d drawn from tons of research material on the cost-effectiveness of terror.There had been over five thousand terrorist incidents in the past decade.Kidnappings were routine business.Ransom requests of five million dollars were not unusual.In this decade a quarter of a billion dollars in ransom money had been paid to terrorists.Business executives were prime targets.U.S. executives led the world, being targeted with particular frequency in the Middle East and Latin America.Simple. He convinced a medium-sized insurance company to sell ransom policies to the multinationals. His job was to figure the risk of enrolling applicants for coverage. He read everything in the public record on terror and traveled widely to set up lines of data-gathering that helped him draw conclusions about overseas operations, the attitudes of host countries, political currents in general. Secrecy was important. If a terrorist group knew that a certain corporation insured its executives against kidnap and ransom, they’d clearly want to consider an action.The man of narrow outlook becomes immersed. Rowser occupied himself profoundly in the customs and attitudes of the secret life. His thoroughness was compulsive and regenerative, a pathological condition. He stopped carrying company ID, he committed phone numbers and addresses to memory, he spent small fortunes on electronic devices. I don’t think he became involved in these things as some men do, because they verge on something deep and unseen, a dream life or alternate self. He wasn’t the kind of man who plays at danger. I think he was simply scared. Risk had become a physical thing.”What’s that?””A book I bought my kid.””I’m a two-time loser,” he said.”We’re only separated, George.””Get divorced.””Why?””Absolutely. I don’t even remember them. If they walked down the street together, I’d go right by.””I don’t want to discuss marriage. I did that an hour ago.””Drink your beer, we’ll go.””Where are we having lunch?””I don’t eat lunch. My doctor told me to drop one meal. We’ll walk around the block. I want an overview on Turkey.””It’s damn hot out there.””I don’t like talking where it may not be secure. Drink down your beer, we’ll go.””It’s insurance. That’s all it is, George. Nobody’s listening.””I’m the kind of person he doesn’t like to break a habit. I started doing things this way and maybe it’s not necessary anymore. Maybe it was never necessary, looking objectively. But a habit is the toughest thing to break for this type person. There is no logic in most habits. This is exactly why they take such hold. A habit is a death grip to somebody like me.”The harsh dry scrape in his voice was halfway poignant. I first met Rowser at a seminar on foreign investments. Many voices besides his own at the Hay-Adams that day. Curious, I thought, how all these regional accents converged on the same sets of words. The language of business is hard-edged and aggressive, drawing some of its technical cant from the weapons pools of the south and southwest, a rural nurturing in a way, a blooding of the gray-suited, the pale, the corporate man. It’s all the same game, these cross-argots suggest.By this time Rowser was head of development for the Northeast Group, a subsidiary of a two-billion-dollar conglomerate he referred to as “the parent.” No more edgy executives. The Northeast Group specialized in political risk insurance for corporations with foreign holdings. In recent years U.S. assets had been seized in two dozen countries and businessmen were looking for financial protection. All those grave Zaireans, those Pakistanis with their sensual lips and bright smiles, voices in melodic ascent, what sweet-natured technocrats they made, running the plants we’d designed and financed, using our very jargon.Rowser and his group were writing political risk insurance in impressive amounts. They sold portions of the original policies to syndicates in order to spread risk and generate whatever cash flow the parent did not supply. He broadened his data collection network and installed a few key people called risk analysts, the title he’d felt unworthy of in the days when he gathered facts for the end of the world. This was the job he offered me. Associate director of risk analysis, Middle East.I was a freelance writer, something of a Renaissance hack. Booklets, pamphlets, leaflets, all kinds of institutional litter for government and industry. Newsletters for a computer firm. Scripts for industrial films. Tax-planning strategies, investment strategies. We had three meetings. At the time I was ghosting a book on global conflict for an Air Force general associated with one of Rowser’s old encampments, the Institute of Risk Analysis at American University. Rowser had seen early pages of the manuscript and it was possible he’d been impressed by the way I’d reshaped the general’s muddled thinking. The general was a living wilderness. Everyone in the risk community knew this.Rowser told me that material flowed into Athens from various control points around the Mediterranean, the Gulf and the Arabian Sea. It needed structuring, it needed perusal by someone with intellectual range. He wanted a view that was broader than the underwriter’s or statistician’s.A tallish fellow with an educated face and khaki hair might be just what he needed for the region.I turned him down. Kathryn, Tap and I were living in an old gabled house in the Champlain Islands, a place her father had owned, and we liked it there, among farms and apple orchards, a lake culture lying between the Green Mountains and the Adirondacks. My grubstreet ways suited us. We had a picture of ourselves as people who needed little. Kathryn was managing a crafts school on North Hero, one island up from us, and the occasional presence in our home of laconic young potters and quilt-makers gave the place a dusting of old-fashioned virtue. We wanted Tap to grow up in North America.A year later we were in Toronto, dividing our books, and Kathryn was speaking Greek to a tape machine. So much for North America. I got in touch with Rowser. He had a man for the region but said he was interested in talking to me. I said it had to be Athens. He’d try to work it out, he told me. It took three months.I’d have a steady job, an office, a secretary, a schedule and clear-cut responsibilities while my wife worked in a trench and my son wrote a novel. A happy pair. They were the freelancers now but I couldn’t shake the feeling that I was the one taking the major risk. There was nothing to come back to if I failed, no place in particular I belonged. They were my place, the only true boundaries I had. I went, I set out, as a man on a dangerous journey, feeling a grimness and will I’d never felt before.Self-satisfied, willing to settle.What are my qualities? This was a question that nagged at the whole affair. Passion, character, fortitude and wit. Cunning and dumb luck. I’d have to command something of all of these. Is this why people try to force events, to find out how complete they are and what they’ve managed to accumulate of drifting fortune? Some kinds of loneliness are an accusation. Do we feel this is what we are, broken down to entity, unpigmented?The rocky brown island, the chalk village, the men spreading their yellow nets, all these forms of emitted light. The layered Minoan soil, ochre and rust and soot, and the shards of painted pottery, these are the passions that saturate the world. And it was Rowser, walking uphill past the jewelry shops along the pedestrian mall, half panting, who was the middleman of all this hazardous love. Rowser in his insurance man’s gray suit.”Lloyd’s wants to declare the Gulf a war zone,” he said. “That could double the tanker premium.””How do you know?””I got some playback from a Kuwaiti defense meeting. They’re figuring a worst-case scenario. Lloyd’s is. Tanker hulks littering the strait. The robed ones are muttering in their beards. Even the parent is nervous about the prospect. It impacts on almost everything they’re involved in.””A war zone.””It has a ring, doesn’t it.”He wanted to know about Turkey. I had precise figures for nonperforming loans. I had classified telex traffic between bank branches in the region. I had foreign exchange factors, inflation rates, election possibilities, exports and imports. I had cars lined up for gasoline, daily power cuts, no water coming out of household taps, crowds of unemployed young men standing on corners, fifteen-year-old girls shot to death for politics. No coffee, no heating oil, no spare parts for combat aircraft. I had martial law, black markets, the International Monetary Fund, God is great.I’d been given the scrambled telexes by my friend David Keller, a credit head at the Mainland Bank. Much of the other material I’d been given by our control for Turkey. The streets of Istanbul were data in their own right, the raw force, the unraveling. The rest came from our contacts at the World Bank and various research institutes.We’d circled back and were heading downhill, single file, along a narrow sidewalk. He talked to me over his shoulder.”Where are you from? Did I ever ask?””Medium-sized town. Pennsylvania.””I’m from Jersey City.””What do you want me to say, George? We’re a long way from home?”We crossed the street to avoid a deposit of soap suds.”Do I want to go to the Acropolis?””Everybody goes,” I told him.”Is there climbing?””They all do it. The lame, the halt.””What’s up there exactly that I have to see it?””You go to Naples to look at dirty pictures.””I have to finagle that. This is nothing,” he said.Five minutes later we were in the office, two modest rooms connected by an arched opening. My secretary, a middle-aged woman who liked to be called Mrs. Helen, was at a funeral in the north somewhere.Rowser took off his shoes and asked to see telexes, notes, memoranda, whatever I could give him. Stamped documents, rows of figures. As he settled into his reading I felt myself beginning to perceive the silence, the eerie calm that closed in gradually every time I came in here from the street. The building was in a cul-de-sac, a preciously quiet spot in a city hardened to noise. Noise is a kind of rain to Athenians, an environment shaped by nature. Nothing can prevent it.”When do you leave, George?””Tomorrow.””TW?””Right.””Expect a stop.””It’s nonstop.””Expect a stop. Shannon or Goose Bay.””Why?” he said.”They take off without full tanks. They tell you it’s too hot here and the fuel expands. Or the runway’s too short and the fuel is heavy. It’s the fuel all right. More expensive here. They like to fill up elsewhere.””It comes back to that.””No escape,” I said.He went back to his reading. I sat at my desk with a lemon drink, watching him. He had a dozen nervous gestures. He touched his face, his clothes, blinking almost constantly. I imagined him stranded in Goose Bay. Big empty remote innocent Labrador. Scraped-clean-by-the-wind Labrador. No politics, no risk. The place would be an offense to him, a white space he could not know through numbers. He would die there, gesturing.

Summer nights belong to people in the streets. Everyone is outdoors, massed against the stonescape. We reconceive the city as a collection of unit spaces that people occupy in a fixed order of succession. Park benches, café tables, the swinging seats on ferris wheels in the carnival lots. Pleasure is not diversion but urgent life, a social order perceived as temporary. People go to movies set up in vacant lots and eat in tavernas that are improvised according to topography. Chairs and tables appear on sidewalks, rooftops and patios, on stepped streets and in alleys, and amplified music comes gusting across the soft night. The cars are out, the motorcycles and scooters and jeeps, and there are arguments, radios playing, the sound of auto horns. Horns that chime, that beep, that squeal, that blast a fanfare, horns that play popular tunes. Young men on the summer hunt. Horns, tires, crackling exhausts. This noise is annunciatory, we feel. They are saying they are on the way, they are close, they are here.Only the men in their local cafes keep indoors, where the light is good and they can play pinochle and backgammon and read newspapers with enormous headlines, a noise of its own. They are always there behind the floor-to-ceiling windows, skeptics before the cadences of life, and in winter they will still be there, in place, wearing hats and coats indoors on the coldest nights, tossing cards through the dense smoke.People everywhere are absorbed in conversation. Seated under trees, under striped canopies in the squares, they bend together over food and drink, their voices darkly raveled in Oriental laments that flow from radios in basements and back kitchens. Conversation is life, language is the deepest being. We see the patterns repeat, the gestures drive the words. It is the sound and picture of humans communicating. It is talk as a definition of itself. Talk. Voices out of doorways and open windows, voices on the stuccoed-brick balconies, a driver taking both hands off the wheel to gesture as he speaks. Every conversation is a shared narrative, a thing that surges forward, too dense to allow space for the unspoken, the sterile. The talk is unconditional, the participants drawn in completely.This is a way of speaking that takes such pure joy in its own openness and ardor that we begin to feel these people are discussing language itself. What pleasure in the simplest greeting. It’s as though one friend says to another, “How good it is to say ‘How are you?’ ” The other replying, “When I answer ‘I am well and how are you,’ what I really mean is that I’m delighted to have a chance to say these familiar things—they bridge the lonely distances.”The seller of lottery tickets comes dragging along, his curious stave all blazoned with flapping papers, and he calls a word or two into the dimness, then walks some more.The motion is toward the sea, the roads lead to the sea, the cars come down as though to spawn among the warships and trawlers. In a taverna along the coast we were nine for dinner, lingering well past midnight over wine and fruit. The Kellers, David and Lindsay. The Bordens, Richard and Dorothy (Dick and Dot). Axton, James. A Greek named Eliades, black-bearded, deeply attentive. The Maitlands, Ann and Charles. A German doing business.For most of its duration the dinner progressed like any other.The Bordens told a story in alternating voices about having car trouble on a mountain road. They walked to a village and drew a picture of a car for a man sitting under a tree. Dick traveled a lot and drew pictures wherever he went. He was friendly, cheerful, prematurely bald and told the same stories repeatedly, using identical gestures and intonations. He was an engineer who spent most of his time in the Gulf. Dot was a mother of twin girls, talkative, cheerful, weight-conscious (they both were), an energetic shopper, ready to lead expeditions to American brand names. Dick and Dot were our comic book couple. Once their stories were told, they were content to make background noises, to laugh easily and pleasantly, rewarding us for the allowances we made.”I’m good at faces, bad at names,” she said to the Greek.I watched Lindsay talk with Charles Maitland. Other voices at my ear, an old man strumming a guitar near the wine casks. She was the youngest of us by a wide margin. Light hair worn long, light blue eyes, hands crossed on the table. A mood of calm, a sun-bather’s marginal apartness. She had a broad face, conspicuously American, and of a type, the still hopeful outer suburbs, the face in the train window, unadorned, flushed by some outdoor task.Charles said something that made her laugh.This clear sound in the music and dense talk called up the voices of women passing below my terrace at night. How is it possible that one syllable of laughter, a spray in the dark, could tell me a woman was American? This sound is exact, minutely clear and telling, and I’d hear it rise through the cypresses across the street, Americans, walking, single file along the high wall, lost tourists, students, expatriates.”Travel is a kind of fatalism,” Charles was telling her. “At my age, I’m beginning to sense the menace ahead. I’m going to die soon, goes the refrain, so I’d better see the bloody sights. This is why I don’t travel except on business.””You’ve lived everywhere.””Living is different. One doesn’t gather up sights in quite the same way. There’s no compiling of sights. I think it’s when people get old they begin to compile. They not only visit pyramids, they try to build a pyramid out of the sights of the world.””Travel as tomb-building,” I said.”He listens in. The worst kind of dinner companion. Chooses his moments.” He made a fist around his cigarette. “Living is different, you see. We were saving the sights for our old age. But now the whole idea of travel begins to reek of death. I have nightmares about busloads of rotting corpses.””Stop,” she said.”Guidebooks and sturdy shoes. I don’t want to give in.””But you’re not old.””My lungs are shot. More wine,” he said.”I wish I could see a merry twinkle in your eyes. Then I’d know you were kidding.””My eyes are shot too.”Lindsay was in some ways the stabilizing center of our lives together, our lives as dinner companions, people forced by circumstance to get along. In a way, despite her age, it was logical.She was the one most recently removed from a fixed life. It said something about the world of corporate transients that we saw her as a force for equilibrium. No doubt she gave David the latitude he needed. She would enjoy his moments of dangerous fun and be uncritical of the corollary broodings.Second wives. I wondered if there was a sense in which they felt they’d been preparing for this all along. Waiting to put the gift to use, the knack for solving difficult men. And I wondered if some men tore through first marriages believing this was the only way to arrive at the settled peace that a younger woman held in her flawless hands, knowing he’d appear one day, a slurry of blood and axle grease. To women, these men must have the glamour of a wrecked Ferrari. I could see how David would be one of these. I envied him this reassuring woman, at the same time not forgetting how much I valued the depth of Kathryn’s resolve, her rigorous choices and fixed beliefs. This is the natural state.The German, named Stahl, was talking to me about refrigeration systems. Below us a slack tide washed against the narrow beach. A waiter brought melon, whitish green with spotted yellow rind. These mass dinners had shifting patterns, directional changes of conversation, and I found myself involved in an intricate cross-cut talk with the German, to my right, on air cooling, and with David Keller and Dick Borden, at the other end and other side of the table, on famous movie cowboys and the names of their horses. David was going to Beirut the next day. Charles was going to Ankara. Ann was going to Nairobi to visit her sister. Stahl was going to Frankfurt. Dick was going to Muscat, Dubai and Riyadh.Two children ran through the room, the guitarist started singing. At the far edge of auditory range, through all the cross-talk, I heard Ann Maitland, in conversation with this man Eliades, switch briefly from English to Greek. A phrase or short sentence, that was all, and she probably had no motive except to clarify or emphasize a point. But it seemed an intimacy, the way her voice softly closed around this fragment, it seemed a contact of some private kind. How strange, that a few words in a foreign language (the local language, spoken at surrounding tables) could float through to me, suggesting the nature of a confidence, making the other dialogue seem so much random noise. Ann was probably a dozen years older than he was. Attractive, bantering, sometimes unsure of things, drawn taut, with a self-mocking imperial way about her and beautiful sorry eyes. Did I begrudge her a sentence in Greek? About Eliades I knew nothing, not even which one of us he was connected to, or in what way. He’d arrived late, making the customary remark about normal time and Greek time.”Topper,” Dick Borden said. “That was Hopalong Cassidy’s horse.”David said, “Hopalong Cassidy? I’m talking about cowboys, man. Guys who got down there in the shit and the muck. Guys with broken-down rummy sidekicks.””Hoppy had a sidekick. He chewed tobacky.”David got up to find the toilet, taking a handful of black grapes with him. I drew Charles into the colloquy with the German, deftly, and then went around the table to David’s chair, sitting across from Ann and Eliades. He had bitten into a peach and was smelling the pit-streaked flesh. I think I smiled, recognizing my own mannerism. These peaches were a baffling delight, certain ones, producing the kind of sense pleasure that’s so unexpectedly deep it seems to need another context. Ordinary things aren’t supposed to be this gratifying. Nothing about the exterior of the peach tells you it will be so lush, moist and aromatic, juices running along your gums, or so subtly colored inside, a pink-veined golden bloom. I tried to discuss this with the faces across the table.”But I think pleasure is not easy to repeat,” Eliades said. “Tomorrow you will eat a peach from the same basket and be disappointed. Then you will wonder if you were mistaken. A peach, a cigarette. I enjoy one cigarette out of a thousand. Still I keep smoking. I think pleasure is in the moment more than in the thing. I keep smoking to find this moment. Maybe I will die trying.”Possibly it was his appearance that gave these remarks the importance of a world view. His wild beard covered most of his face. It started just below the eyes. He seemed to be bleeding this coarse black hair. His shoulders curved forward as he spoke and he rocked slightly at the front edge of the chair. He wore a tan suit and pastel tie, an outfit at odds with the large fierce head, the rough surface he carried.I tried to pursue the notion that some pleasures overflow the conditions attending them. Maybe I was a little drunk.Ann said, “Let’s not have metaphysics this evening. I’m a plain girl from a mill town.””There is always politics,” Eliades said.He was looking at me with a humorous expression. I thought I read a tactful challenge there. If the subject was too delicate, he seemed to be saying, I might honorably go back to cowboys.”A Greek word, of course. Politics.””Do you know Greek?” he said.”I’m having a hard time learning. I’ve felt at a constant disadvantage since my first day in this part of the world. I’ve felt stupid in fact. How is it so many people know three, four, five languages?””That is politics too,” he said, and his teeth showed yellowish in the mass of hair. “The politics of occupation, the politics of dispersal, the politics of resettlement, the politics of military bases.”Wind shook the bamboo canopy and blew paper napkins across the floor. Dick Borden, at the head of the table, to my left, talked across me to his wife, who was on my immediate right, about getting on home to relieve the sitter. Lindsay brushed past my chair. Someone joined the old guitarist in his song, a man, dark and serious, turning in his chair to face the musician.”For a long time,” Dot said to the German, “we didn’t know our exact address. Postal code, district, we didn’t know these things.” She turned to Eliades. “And our telephone number wasn’t the number on our telephone. We didn’t know how to find out our real number. But I told you this, didn’t I, at that thing at the Hilton?”The peach pit sat on Eliades’ plate. He leaned forward to extend a cigarette from his pack of Old Navy. When I smiled no, he offered the pack down one side of the table, up the other. Ann was talking to Charles. Was this the point in the evening at which husbands and wives find each other again, suppressing yawns, making eye contact through the smoke? Time to go, time to resume our murky shapes. The public self is weary of its gleam.”It is very interesting,” Eliades was telling me, “how Americans learn geography and world history as their interests are damaged in one country after another. This is interesting.”Would I leap to my country’s defense?”They learn comparative religion, economics of the Third World, the politics of oil, the politics of race and hunger.””Politics again.””Yes, always politics. There is no place to hide.”He was smiling politely.Ann said, “Do you need a ride, Andreas? We’re about to leave, I think.””I have my car, thank you.”Charles was trying to signal the waiter.”I think it’s only in a crisis that Americans see other people. It has to be an American crisis, of course. If two countries fight that do not supply the Americans with some precious commodity, then the education of the public does not take place. But when the dictator falls, when the oil is threatened, then you turn on the television and they tell you where the country is, what the language is, how to pronounce the names of the leaders, what the religion is all about, and maybe you can cut out recipes in the newspaper of Persian dishes. I will tell you. The whole world takes an interest in this curious way Americans educate themselves. TV. Look, this is Iran, this is Iraq. Let us pronounce the word correctly. E-ron. E-ronians. This is a Sunni, this is a Shi’ite. Very good. Next year we do the Philippine Islands, okay?””You know American TV?””Three years,” he said. “All countries where the U.S. has strong interests stand in line to undergo a terrible crisis so that at last the Americans will see them. This is very touching.””Beware,” Ann said. “He is leading up to something.””I know what he’s leading up to. When he says two countries fight, I understand him to mean the Greeks and the Turks. He is leading up to poor little Greece and how we’ve abused her. Turkey, Cyprus, the CIA, U.S. military bases. He slipped in military bases a while back. I’ve been wary ever since.”His smile broadened, a little wolfish now.”This is interesting, how a U.S. bank based in Athens can lend money to Turkey. I like this very much. Okay, they are the southeast flank and there are U.S. bases there and the Americans want to spy on the Russians, okay. Lift the embargo, give them enormous foreign aid. This is Washington. Then you also lend them enormous sums privately, if it is possible to call a bank the size of yours a private institution. You approve loans from your headquarters in the middle of Athens. But the documentation is done in New York and London. Why is this, because of sensitivity to the feelings of Greeks? No, it is because the Turks will be insulted if the agreements are signed on Greek soil. How much face could a Turk bring to such a meeting? This is considerate, I think. This is very understanding.” His shoulders curved forward, head hanging over the table. “You structure the loan and when they can’t pay the money, what happens? I will tell you. You have a meeting in Switzerland and you restructure. Athens gives to Ankara. I like this. This is interesting to me.””Oh dear,” Ann said. “I think you have the wrong man, Andreas. This is not David Keller. You want David. He’s the banker.””I am James. The risk analyst.”Eliades sat back in his chair, arms spread wide in a request for pardon. It wasn’t much of an offense, the facts being what they were, but the small error had robbed his moral force of its effectiveness. A boy was clearing the table. Charles leaned my way to collect some money.”Need a ride?” he said.”Came with David.””That doesn’t answer my question.””Where is the cowboy?”Eliades poured the last of the wine into my glass. His fingers were coppery with nicotine. For the first time all night he stopped his determined observing. Names, faces, strands of conversation. The old man sang alone, a cat walked the rail above the beach.”What is a risk analyst?””Politics,” I said. “Very definitely.””I am glad.”Dick and Dot offered to take the German to his hotel. Charles moved next to me while he waited for the change to come. The man who made change, the most important job in the country judging by the look of such men, sat at a desk full of papers, with a hand calculator and a metal box for money in front of him, and he wore a tie and jacket and knitted V-neck sweater, and had graying hair cropped close and shadowy jowls, and was wide, thick and despotic, the only stationary presence in that part of the room, where waiters and other family members moved back and forth.Eliades walked as far as the parking area with the departing people. I heard the Bordens laughing out there. The waiters wore tight white shirts with the edges of their short sleeves folded back. There were three of us at the table now.”Not a bad evening,” Ann said. “As these things go.””What do you mean?””Not a bad evening.””How do these things go?” Charles said.”They simply go.””What, they shoot out toward infinity?””I suppose they do in a sense. James would know.””No French tonight to tell us how shifty the Lebanese are,” he said. “No Lebanese to tell us how the Saudis pick their feet in business meetings. No one to say about Syrians from Aleppo, ‘Count your fingers after you shake hands with them.’‘”No one from the Midlands selling smoke alarms.””Yes, remember Ruddle.””His name was Wood.””The fellow with the bad eye. The eye that drifted.””His name was Wood,” she said.”Why would I think Ruddle?””You’re tired, I suppose.””What does fatigue have to do with the name Ruddle?”Charles coughed into the hand that was curled around his cigarette.”What about you?” he asked her. “Tired?””Not very. A little.””When are you off?””A seven o’clock flight actually.””That’s mad.””Isn’t it insane? I’ll have to be out the door at five.””But that’s mad,” he said without conviction.”No matter. I sleep on planes.””Yes, you do, don’t you?””What do you mean?” she said.”By what?””James heard. A note of accusation. Are people who sleep on planes less mentally alert? More in touch with our primitive nature perhaps? How easily we descend. Is this what you’re saying?””Christ, what energy.”There was a long moment in which we seemed to be listening to ourselves breathe. Ann toyed absently with the remaining utensils, a knife and spoon. Then she stopped.”Does anyone know why we’re sitting here?” she said.”That gangster is counting out change.”As Eliades headed back, there was a stir at a far table, people talking in loud voices, laughing, someone getting up to point. Others looked over the rail. I watched Andreas walk over there and look down to the beach. He motioned us over.A woman came out of the sea, tawny hair clinging to her shoulders and face. It was Lindsay in her sea-jade summer dress, twisted slightly at the hips, sticking wet. Her laughter rang among our voices, clear as bell metal, precisely shaped. Using both hands she scooped hair from the sides of her face, head tilted back. Ten yards behind was David, bent over, retching in knee-deep water.Happy babble from the taverna.He emerged now, still in his blazer and Italian pants, his sleek black slip-ons, and Lindsay laughed again, watching him walk sopping in small circles, making those coarse noises. He moved heavily, like a plaster-cast man, arms held out from his body, legs well apart. A waiter aimed a light nearly straight down, helping Lindsay find her shoes, and she stopped laughing long enough to call efbaristó, merci, thank you, and the sound of her voice set her laughing again. She stepped into the shoes, her body glistening a little, beginning to tremble. David was standing nearly upright now, limbs still spread wide. Only his head was lowered, as though he’d decided to study the sandy-wet shoes for an explanation. He was coughing hoarsely and Lindsay turned to point him toward a stone path. People started returning to their tables.David called up, “The water’s no good to drink.””Oceans ordinarily aren’t,” Charles said.”Well I’m just advising people.””Did you swim or wade?” Ann said.”We swam out to the float but there is no float.””That’s a different beach. You want the one just south of here.””That’s what Lindsay said.”We went back to the table as they started climbing the path through the trees. Charles got his change, he and Ann said goodnight. Eliades disappeared into the kitchen, coming back a moment later with four glasses of brandy clustered in his hands.”The owner,” he said. “Private stock.”I thought of Kathryn, who liked a fingerbreadth of Metaxa on raw nights, sitting up in bed to read and sip, her mouth warm with it, later, in the dark. Prophetic significance. All those northern nights lapped in snow, the world shocked white under Polaris, our hushed love smelling of Greek booze.”Tell me, Andreas, what were you doing in the States?””Refrigeration systems.””Cheers,” I said.”Cheers.”Swallowing slowly.”You’re connected with the German fellow then.””Yes, Stahl.””And Stahl is here to do business with Dick Borden?””No, with Hardeman.””Who is Hardeman?””He is the banker’s friend. I thought your friend.””David’s friend.””But he didn’t come. We think his flight was delayed. A sandstorm in Cairo.”Lindsay stood ten feet away, shyly, as though we might send her from the room. She’d been wringing out the hem of her dress and the fabric was full of spiral twists. Andreas extended a glass and she came forward, followed by a boy with a mop.”This is so nice. Thank you. Cheers.””Where’s David?” I said.”He’s in the men’s room, freshening up.”This set her off again, laughing. She barely got the sentence out before her face went tight with glee. I put my jacket around her shoulders. She sat there rigid with laughter, her face looking synthetic, an object under measured stress.”Freshening up,” she said again, and sat there shivering, crying with laughter.In time she began to settle down, whispering her thanks for the brandy, drawing the jacket more closely around her, whispering her thanks for the jacket. A mood of soft withdrawal. She was too self-conscious to return the pampering smiles of people at other tables.”I don’t have to ask if you like to swim,” Andreas said.”I don’t think what we did was really a swim. I don’t know what to call it.””A David Keller,” I said.”Right, it was a Keller. But I went willingly.””Have you been to the islands?” he said.”Only the one-day tour,” she whispered. “I’m waiting for my curtains.””That’s a line she uses,” I told Andreas. “No one knows what it means.””We’re still moving in really. This is all new to me. I’m only learning to count. The numbers are fun. Do you know the alphabet, James?””Yes, and I can tie my own shoes.””Andreas, is it absolutely necessary to know verbs? Must we know verbs?””I think it will help,” he said. “You seem to be very active.”Both men were singing again. The customer, a man with dark hair and a full mustache, was looking directly at the guitarist, who stood against the wine casks, one foot up on a chair, head slightly tilted toward his bent left hand. The song gathered force, a spirited lament. Its tone evoked inevitable things. Time was passing, love was fading, grief was deep and total. As with people in conversation, these men appeared to go beyond the soulful routine woe of the lyrics. Their subjects were memory and tragic narrative and men who put their voices to song. The dark man was intense, his eyes still fixed on the old musician, never wavering. He was charged with feeling. His eyes were bright with it. The song called up a luminous fervor and he seemed to rise slightly in the chair. The men were twenty feet apart, voices shading into each other. The guitarist looked up then, a spare figure with gray stubble, someone’s second cousin, the man we see asleep at corner tables all through the islands. For the rest of the song they looked at each other, strangers, to something beyond. A blood recollection, a shared past. I didn’t know.

I sat with David on his terrace above the National Gardens, across from the Olympic Stadium, looking toward the Acropolis. Pentelic marble old and new. The prime minister lived in a two-bedroom apartment in the next building.”They pay some heavyish coin.”He was talking about his more difficult postings. He sat in his damp clothes, minus the shoes and blazer, drinking beer. He was a fairly large man, just beginning to flesh out, slow-moving in a vaguely dangerous way.Noise in short bursts issued from motorcycles crossing the dark city. Lindsay was asleep.”The gamier the place, or the more ticklish politically, or the more sand dunes per square mile, obviously they sweeten the pot, our New York masters. The dunes in the Empty Quarter reach eight, nine hundred feet. I flew over with a guy from Aramco. Forget it.”In Jeddah the fruit bats swooped out of the night to take water from his pool, drinking in full flight. His wife, the first, came out of the house one day to find three baboons pounding on the hood and roof of their car.In Tehran, between wives, he invented the name Chain Day. This was the tenth day of Muharram, the period of mourning and self-flagellation. As hundreds of thousands of people marched toward the Shahyad monument, some of them wearing funeral shrouds, striking themselves with steel bars and knife blades affixed to chains, David was hosting a Chain Day party at his house in North Tehran, an area sealed off from the marchers by troops and tank barricades. The partygoers could hear the chanting mobs but whether they were chanting “Death to the shah” or “God is great,” and whether it mattered, no one knew for sure. The thing he feared in Tehran was traffic. The apocalyptic inching pack-ice growl of four miles of cars. The drivers’ free-form ways. Cars kept coming at him in reverse. He was always finding himself driving down a narrow street with a car coming toward him backwards. The driver expected him to move, or ascend, or vanish. Eventually he saw what was so fearful about this, a thing so simple he hadn’t been able to isolate it from the larger marvel of a city full of cars going backwards. They did not reduce speed when driving in reverse. To David Keller, between wives, this seemed an interesting thing. There was a cosmology here, a rich structure of some kind, a theorem in particle physics. Reverse and forward were interchangeable. And why not, what was the difference really? A moving vehicle is no different moving backwards than it is moving forwards, especially when the driver regards the whole arrangement as if he were on foot, able to touch, to bump, to brush his way past vague obstacles in the street. This was the second revelation of David’s stay in Tehran. People drove as if they were walking. They veered idiosyncratically, these fellows with their army surplus field jackets and their interesting sense of space.In Istanbul, earlier, he used to tell people he wanted to get Mainland New York to approve purchase of a jeep-mounted recoilless rifle, plus jeep, to get him to and from the rep office. More seriously he talked about armoring his car. “Armoring your car,” he told me, “is known as a major expenditure proposal. Forty thousand dollars. Allowing your driver to carry a gun is known as a small arms shipment to the Marxist-Leninist Armed Propaganda Squad. Not that the driver would give them the piece. They’d take it after they blew you both away with antitank grenades and AK-47s.”This summer, the summer in which we sat on his broad terrace, was the period after the shah left Iran, before the hostages were taken, before the Grand Mosque and Afghanistan. The price of oil was an index to the Western world’s anxiety. It provided a figure, $24 a barrel, say, to measure against the figure of the month before or the year before. It was a handy way to refer to our complex involvements. It told us how bad we felt at a given time.”How’s Tap doing?””The kid writes novels, he eats octopus.””Good. That’s great.””How are yours? Where are they living?””Michigan. They’re doing fine. They love it. They swim. “”What’s your first wife’s name?””Grace,” he said. “That’s a first wife’s name, isn’t it?””Does Lindsay talk about having kids?””Shit, Lindsay’ll do anything. She’s crazy. Did she tell you she found a job? Great break, she’s been getting antsy for something to do. She’ll teach English at one of these language schools. It’s an escape from the bank wives and their get-togethers.””I haven’t noticed you two hosting any dinner parties for Mainland people here on business. Or evacuees from disturbed areas. You’re the credit head, aren’t you?””Disturbed areas. That’s what we call them all right. Like snow flurries on a weather map. Dinner parties in this division are famous for eyewitness accounts of very large groups of people marching on embassies and banks. Also famous for unrelenting politeness. All the ethnic groups and religious subgroups. Can you seat a Druze next to a Maronite? They’re all more or less multinationalized but who knows what lies underneath? We have a Sikh who carries the mandatory sect knife somewhere on his person. Sometimes I’m careful what I say without knowing precisely why. Grace used to handle things when we were in Beirut and Jeddah and Istanbul. She handled things beautifully in fact. Lindsay I don’t think would be all that adept. I think she’d stand there laughing.””What about the Americans?””Eerie people. Genetically engineered to play squash and work weekends. That swim made me hungry.”David drank slowly but steadily whenever possible. In the course of a long Sunday lunch on the eastern shore or a night almost anywhere, his voice would begin to rumble and drone, grow friendlier, taking on paternal tones, and in his large blond face a ruined child would appear, barely discernible in the slack flesh, a watcher, distant and contrite.”Our office in Monrovia has a guy on the payroll whose job is catching snakes. That’s all he does. He goes to employees’ houses on a regular basis, through the yard, the garden, the hedges, catching snakes.””What’s he called officially?””The snake catcher.””That’s remarkably direct,” I said.”They couldn’t come up with a buzz word for snake, it seems.”This was the summer before crowds attacked the U.S. embassies in Islamabad and Tripoli, before the assassinations of American technicians in Turkey, before Liberia, the executions on the beach, the stoning of dead bodies, the evacuation of personnel from the Mainland Bank.”Does Kathryn ever get to Athens?””No.””I meet my kids in New York,” he said.”That’s easier than going to the island.””We eat banana splits in the hotel room. They cost eight dollars each.””Did Grace ever attack you physically?””She’s not a physical person, Grace.””Ever hit her? I’m serious.””No. Ever hit Kathryn?””We’ve scuffled. No clean blows. She took a run at me once with a kitchen thing.””What for?””She found out I went to bed with a friend of hers. It led to words.””The friend made sure she found out?””She let on, somehow. She sent signals.””So you nearly got spiked with an ice pick.””It was just a potato peeler. What annoyed the friend was my perceived indifference. It was one of those situations. You find yourself in a situation. Alone with Antoinette. The two of you have felt the usual secret lustings. The normal healthy subatomic lustful vibrations. These are feelings that get acted on when man and wife split up. Suddenly there’s an Antoinette, destiny in her eyes. But Kathryn and I hadn’t split up. We hadn’t done anything. The situation just arose. The combination of circumstances.””What situation? Paint a picture.””Never mind a picture.””Her apartment?””Her house. Diagonally across the park from ours.””Summer, winter?””Winter.””The plant-filled parlor room. The glass of wine.””Something like that.””The intimate talk,” he said.”Yes.””Always the intimate talk. This woman is divorced, right?””Yes.””The sadness,” he said.”There was sadness, yes. But it had nothing to do with her divorce. She’d just lost her job. The CBC. They fired her.””The sadness.””All right the sadness.””The longing.””Yes, there was longing.””The need,” he said.”Yes.””In the starry night, in the parlor room, sipping dry white wine.””It was a good job. She was upset.”” ‘Comfort me, comfort me.’‘”Anyway I gave the impression of wavering. I must have drawn back. This was inexcusable, of course. I hesitated, I showed uncertainty. We did the thing finally. We couldn’t end our friendship, commit our crime, without finishing what we’d started. So we did the thing. We eked out a fuck. What an idiot I was. Antoinette got her sweet revenge.””She let on.””She let on. And in letting on she didn’t fail to communicate this half-heartedness of mine. I don’t know how she did this without being direct, which I gather she wasn’t. I suppose in fables and parables, in allegories. The language of women and children. This is what got Kathryn really furious, I think. Not just the sex, the friend. The way I went about it. I committed a crime against the earth. That’s what made her want to carve my ribs.””Did it clear the air? This knife fight?””Beginning of the end.””We married young,” he said. “We didn’t know anything. You know the story. Little or no experience. Grace said I was the first, more or less the first, really the first, the first in any important way.”We laughed.”I knew our marriage was shot to hell when we started watching TV in different rooms,” he said. “If her sound was up loud enough, I could hear her change channels in there. When she went to the same channel I was watching, I switched channels myself. I couldn’t bear watching the same stuff she was watching. I believe this is called estrangement.””You’re not going to become a stereotype, are you?””What do you mean?””It’s bad enough you have a new young wife. You don’t want to be thought of as one of these men with an old wife and old kids back in the States. These are the wives who weren’t dynamic enough to keep up with men like you in the great surge of your multinational career. The old wives and old kids are gray and stooped, sitting in front of TV sets in the suburbs. The wives have head colds all the time. The old dogs are listless on the patios.””At least my new young wife isn’t a fantasy wife. A stewardess or model. You know Hardeman? His second wife is a former ball girl for the Atlanta Braves. She used to sit along the left-field line waiting for foul balls. I think she found one in Hardeman.”David was casual about most bank matters. He told me what the bank was doing in Turkey and gave me telexes and other paper that detailed loan proposals. These documents impressed Rowser, particularly the ones marked confidential in block letters. I guess David felt there was little or no danger in giving this particular classified material to a friend. We were serving the same broad ends.”Sometimes I wonder what I’m doing in some of these places. I can’t get the Empty Quarter out of my mind. We flew right over the dunes, man, nothing but sand, a quarter of a million square miles. A planet of sand. Sand mountains, sand plains and valleys. Sand weather, a hundred and thirty, a hundred and forty degrees, and I can’t imagine what it’s like when the wind’s blowing. I tried to convince myself it was beautiful. The desert, you know. The vast sweep. But it scared me. This Aramco guy told me he can stand on the airstrip they have out there and he can hear the blood flowing in his body. Is it the silence or the heat that makes this possible? Or both? Hear the blood.””What were you doing flying over this place?””Oil, boy. What else? Big field. We’re financing some construction.””You know what Maitland says.””What does he say?””Opportunity, adventure, sunsets, dusty death.”David went in to get me a beer and another for himself. I was wide awake and feeling hungry. A faint light was visible in the sky, the Parthenon emerging, two-dimensional, a soft but structured image. I followed him to the kitchen and we started eating whatever was lying loose, mainly pastry and fruit. Lindsay came in to complain about the noise. She wore a nightgown with a ruffled hem and we smiled when we saw her.

In these early hours the sky seems very near street level. The street extends from eastern sky to western. It’s always a surprise, entering the boulevard by first light when there’s no traffic, being able to see things as unconnected, the embassy mansions with their period detail, objects coming out of the gloom, mulberry trees and kiosks, and to make out the contours of the street itself, a place of clear limits, we see, with its own form and meaning, appearing in the stillness and marine light to be almost a rolling field, a broad path to the mountains. Traffic must be a stream that binds things to some denser perspective.The boulevard was empty only momentarily. A bus moved past, drowned faces pressed against the windows, and then the little cars. Four abreast they came, out of the concrete hollows to the west, the first anxious wave of the day.The way home was uphill into narrower streets, severely graded toward the pine woods and gray rock of Lycabettus. I stood by the bed in my pajamas, feeling vaguely unstuck, my habits no longer bound to hers. The tides and easements of custom. Our book of days. The canaries on the back balconies were singing, already women were beating rugs, and water fell to the courtyard from rows of potted plants, ringing on the bright stone.That was my day.