The Names

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.