The Names

4

The body was found at the edge of a village called Mikro Kamini, an old man, bludgeoned. This village lies about three miles inland, among terraced fields that soon give out before the empty hills and the massive groupings farther in, the pillars and castellated rock forms. The landscape begins to acquire a formal power at Mikro Kamini. There's suggestion of willful distance from the sea, willful isolation, and the fields and groves abruptly end nearby. Here the island becomes the bare Cycladic rock seen from the decks of passing ships, a place of worked-out quarries, goat-bells, insane winds. The villages nestled on the coast seem not so much a refuge for seagoing men nor a series of maze structures contrived to discourage entrance by force, make a laborious business of marauding; from here they are detailed reliefs or cameos, wishing not to attract the attention of whatever forces haunt the interior. The streets that bend back on themselves or disappear, the miniature churches and narrow lanes, these seem a form of self-effacement, a way of saying there is nothing here worth bothering about. They are a huddling, a gathering together against the stark landforms and volcanic rock. Superstition, vendetta, incest. The things that visit the spirit in the solitary hills. Bestiality and murder. The whitewashed coastal villages are talismans against these things, formulaic designs.The fear of sea and things that come from the sea is easily spoken. The other fear is different, hard to name, the fear of things at one's back, the silent inland presence.At the house we sat in the slanted living room in low cane chairs. Kathryn made tea."I talked to people at the restaurant. A hammer, they said.”"You'd think a gun. Land disputes between farmers. A shotgun or rifle.”"He wasn't a farmer," she said, "and he wasn't from that village. He lived in a house across the island. He was apparently feeble-minded. He lived with a married niece and her children.”"Tap and I went through there my first visit. I took Owen's motor scooter, remember? You gave us hell.”"Senseless killings are supposed to happen in the New York subways. I've been edgy all day.”"Where are those people from the cave?”"I've been thinking about them too. Owen says they've gone.”"Where is Owen?”"At the site.”"Swimming above the sunken ruins. That's my image of him. An aging dolphin.”"The conservator came back today," she said. "He'd gone off to Crete with someone.”"What does he do?”"Preserves the finds. Puts the pieces together.”"What are the finds?" I said."Look, this work is important. I know what you think. I'm feeding some fanatical impulse.”"Does Owen think it's important?”"Owen's in another world. He's left this one behind. That doesn't mean it's futile work. We find objects. They tell us something. All right, there's no more money for things. No more photographers, no geologists, no draftsmen. But we find objects, we come upon features. This dig wâS designed partly as a field school. Help students learn. And we are learning, those who've stayed.”"What happens next?”"Why does something have to happen next?”"My friends the Maitlands have entertaining arguments. I wish we could learn that skill. They don't waver from an even tone. It's taken me all this time to realize they've been arguing since I've known them. It's an undercurrent. They've made a highly developed skill of it.”"Nobody just digs," she said.Church bells, shuttered windows. She looked at me through the partial darkness, studying something she hadn't seen, possibly, in a long time. I wanted to provoke, make her question herself. Tap came in with a friend, Rajiv, the son of the assistant field director, and there were noises of greeting. The boys wanted to show me something outside and when I turned in the doorway, going out, she was pouring a second cup, leaning toward the bench where the tea things were, and I hoped this wasn't the moment when we became ourselves again. The island's small favors and immunities could not have run out so soon. Bringing something new into being. After the bright shock fades, after the separation, there's the deeper age, the gradual language of love and acceptance, at least in theory, in folklore. The Greek rite. How fitting that she had a male child, someone to love fiercely.The bells stopped ringing. Tap and Rajiv took me along a path near the top of the village. The cut-paper brightness of doors and flowers. The curtains lifted in the wind. They showed me a three-legged dog and waited for my reaction. A shapeless old woman in black, with a red clay face, a black head-scarf, sat outside a house below us, shelling peas. The air settled into an agitated silence. I told them every village has its three-legged dog.

Owen Brademas came up out of the dark, striding, his shoulders set forward against the steep grade. He carried a bottle of wine, holding it aloft when he saw me at the window. Kathryn and I went out and watched him take the stairs two at a time.I had an insight. He is a man who takes stairs two at a time. What this explained I'd no idea.They spent a moment together in the kitchen talking about the dig. I opened the wine, put a match to the candles and then we sat drinking in the wind-stirred light."They're gone. They're definitely gone. I was there. They left garbage, odds and ends.”"When was the old man killed?" I said."I don't know that, James. I've never even been to that village. I have no privileged information. Just what people say.”"He was dead twenty-four hours when they found him," Kath-ryn said. "That's the estimate. Someone came from Syros. Prefect of police, I think he's called, and a coroner apparently. He wasn't a farmer, he wasn't a shepherd.”"When did they leave, Owen?”"I don't know that. I went there only to talk. Out of curiosity. I have no special information.”"Senseless killing.”"A feeble-minded old man," I said. "How did he get across the island?”"He could have walked," she said. "It's what the people in the restaurant think. There's a way to do it on foot if you know the paths. It's barely possible. The theory is he wandered off. Got lost. Ended up there. He often wandered.”"That far?”"I don't know.”"What do you think, Owen?”"I saw them only that one time. I went back because they'd seemed so interested in what I told them. There didn't seem to be a danger in going and I wanted to get more out of them if I could. Obviously they were determined to speak Greek, which was a drawback but not a crucial one. The fact is they probably had no intention of telling me who they are and what they were doing there, in any language.”But there was something he wanted to tell them. An odd fact, a remnant. He thought they'd be interested in this, being zealots of the alphabet or whatever they were, and he hadn't thought of mentioning it the first time they talked.When he went to Qasr Hallabat to see the inscriptions, he'd taken the Zarqa-Azraq road, traveling north from Amman, veering east into the desert. The fortress was in ruins, of course, with cut basalt blocks strewn everywhere. Latin, Greek, Nabatean inscriptions. The order of the Greek stones was totally upset. Even the blocks still standing were out of place, upside down, plastered over. All this done by the Umayyads, who used the stones without regard for the writing on them. They were rebuilding the previous structure, the Byzantine, which had been built from the Roman, and so on, and they wanted building blocks, not edicts carved in Greek.All right. A lovely place to wander around in, full of surprises, a massive crossword for someone in the Department of Antiquities. And all of this, the castle, the stones, the inscriptions, is situated midway between Zarqa and Azraq. To Owen, to someone with Owen's bent for spotting such things, these names are seen at once to be anagrams. This is what he wanted to tell the people in the hills. How strange, he wanted to say, that the place he was looking for, this evocative botched ruin, lay between perfect twin pillars-place-names with the same set of letters, rearranged. And it was precisely a rearrangement, a reordering, that was in progress at Qasr Hallabat. Archaeologists and workmen attempting to match the inscribed blocks.The mind's little infinite, he called all this.I went inside for fruit. With the bowl in my hand I stopped at the door to Tap's room and looked in. He lay with his head turned toward me, wetting his lips in his sleep, a sound like a fussy kiss. I glanced down at the papers on his makeshift writing table, a board jammed into an alcove, but it was too dark to read the painstaking loops and slants.Outside we talked awhile about his writing. It turned out Owen had learned a few days ago that his own early years were the subject matter. He didn't know whether to be pleased or upset."There are many better topics he could find. But I'm happy to learn I've kindled an interest. I'm not sure I want to read the result, however.”"Why not?" I said.He paused to think about this."Don't forget," Kathryn said, "this is fiction we're talking about, even if the nonfiction kind. Real people, made-up remarks. The boy has a fix on the modern mind. Let's show him a little more respect.”"But you said he changed my name.”"I made him.”"If I were a writer," Owen said, "how I would enjoy being told the novel is dead. How liberating, to work in the margins, outside a central perception. You are the ghoul of literature. Lovely.”"Have you ever written?" she said."Never. I used to think it would be grand to be a poet. I was very young, this was long ago, I'm sure I thought a poet was a delicate pale fellow with a low-grade fever.”"Were you a delicate pale fellow?”"Awkward, maybe, but strong, or strong enough. In the tall-grass prairie what you did was work. All that space. I think we plowed and swung the pick and the brush scythe to keep from being engulfed by space. It was like living in the sky. I didn't know how awesome it was until I went away. It grows more awesome all the time, the memory.”"But you've taught in the Midwest and West.”"Different places.”"Not Kansas?”"Not the prairie. There isn't much left. I haven't been home in thirty-five years.”"And you never wrote a poem, Owen? Tell the truth," she said, playing lightly at something."I was a plodder, kind of slow, I think, one of those gawky boys who stands around squinting into the glare. I worked, I did chores, a dutiful son, unhappy. But I don't think I so much as scribbled a single line of poetry, Kathryn, not one.”The flames went flat, shot down, unstable in the wind. The trembling light seemed to wish an urgency on us. I was taking wine in half-glass bursts, getting drier all the time. The others rambled calmly toward midnight."Solitude.”"We lived in town for a time. Then outside, a lonely place, barely a place at all.”"I was never alone," she said. "When my mother died I think my father made a point of filling the house with people. It was like one of those old stage comedies in which the main characters are about to set sail for Europe. The set is full of luggage. Friends and well-wishers keep showing up. Complications develop.”"We were in the middle. Everything was around us, somehow equidistant. Everything was space, extremes of weather.”"We kept moving. My father kept buying houses. We'd live in a house for a while and then he'd buy another. Sometimes he got around to selling the old one, sometimes he didn't. He never learned how to be wealthy. People might despise a man for that but everyone liked him. His house-buying was anything but ostentatious. There was a deep restlessness in him, an insecurity. He was like someone trying to slip away in the night. Loneliness was a disease he seemed to think had been lying in wait for him all along. Everyone liked him. I think this worried him somehow. Made sad by friendship. He must have had a low opinion of himself.”"Then I was a man. In fact I was forty. I realized I saw the age of forty from a child's viewpoint.”"I know the feeling," I said. "Forty was my father's age. All fathers were forty. I keep fighting the idea I'm fast approaching his age. As an adult I've only been two ages. Twenty-two and forty. I was twenty-two well into my thirties. Now I've begun to be forty, two years shy of the actual fact. In ten years I'll still be forty.”"At your age I began to feel my father present in me. There were unreal moments.”"You felt he was occupying you. I know. Suddenly he's there. You even feel you look like him.”"Brief moments. I felt I'd become my father. He took me over, he filled me.”"You step into an elevator, suddenly you're him. The door closes, the feeling's gone. But now you know who he was.”"Tomorrow we do mothers," Kathryn said. "Except count me out. I barely remember mine.”"Your mother's death is what did it to him," I said.She looked at me."How could you know that? Did he talk to you about it?”"No.”"Then how could you know that?”I took a long time filling the glasses and composed my voice to sound a new theme."Why is it we talk so much here? I do the same in Athens. Inconceivable, all this conversation, in North America. Talking, listening to others talk. Keller threw me out at six-thirty the other morning. It must be life outdoors. Something in the air.”"You're half smashed all the time. That's one possibility.”"We talk more, drunk or sober," I said. "The air is filled with words.”He looked past us, firmly fixed, a lunar sadness. I wondered what he saw out there. His hands were clasped on his chest, large hands, nicked and scarred, a digger and rock gouger, a plowboy once. Kathryn's eyes met mine. Her compassion for the man was possibly large enough to allow some drippings for the husband in his supplication. Merciful bountiful sex. The small plain bed in the room at the end of the hotel corridor, sheets drawn tight. That too might be a grace and favor of the island, a temporary lifting of the past."I think they're on the mainland," Owen said.How could you understand, he seemed to be asking. Your domestic drama, your tepid idiom of reproach and injury. These ranks of innocent couples with their marriage wounds. He kept looking past us."They said something about the Peloponnese. It wasn't entirely clear. One of them seemed to know a place there, somewhere they might stay.”Kathryn said, "Is this something the police ought to be told?”"I don't know. Is it?" The movement of his hand toward the wine glass brought him back. "Lately I've been thinking of Rawlinson, the Englishman who wanted to copy the inscriptions on the Behistun rock. The languages were Old Persian, Elamite and Babylonian. Maneuvering on ladders from the first group to the second, he nearly fell to his death. This inspired him to use a Kurdish boy to copy the Babylonian set, which was the least accessible. The boy inched across a rock mass that had only the faintest indentations he might use for finger-grips. Fingers and toes. Maybe he used the letters themselves. I'd like to believe so. This is how he proceeded, clinging to the rock, passing below the great bas-relief of Darius facing a group of rebels in chains. A sheer drop. But he made it, miraculously, according to Rawlinson, and was eventually able to do a paper cast of the text, swinging from a sort of bosun's chair. What kind of story is this and why have I been thinking about it lately?”"It's a political allegory," Kathryn said."Is that what it is? I think it's a story about how far men will go to satisfy a pattern, or find a pattern, or fit together the elements of a pattern. Rawlinson wanted to decipher cuneiform writing. He needed these three examples of it. When the Kurdish boy swung safely back over the rock, it was the beginning of the Englishman's attempt to discover a great secret. All the noise and babble and spit of three spoken languages had been subdued and codified, broken down to these wedge-shaped marks. With his grids and lists the decipherer searches out relationships, parallel structures. What are the sign frequencies, the phonetic values? He wants a design that will make this array of characters speak to him. After Rawlinson came Norris. It's interesting, Kathryn, that both these men were at one time employed by the East India Company. A different pattern here, again one age speaks to another. We can say of the Persians that they were enlightened conquerors, at least in this instance. They preserved the language of the subjugated people. This same Elamite language was one of those deciphered by the political agents and interpreters of the East India Company. Is this the scientific face of imperialism? The humane face?”"Subdue and codify," Kathryn said. "How many times have we seen it?”"If it's a story about how far men will go," he said, "why have I been thinking about it? Maybe it bears on the murder of that old man. If your suspicions about the cult are well-founded, and if they are a cult, I can tell you it probably wasn't a senseless killing, Kathryn. It wasn't casual. They didn't do it for thrills.”"You saw them and talked to them.”"That's my judgment. I could be wrong. We could all be wrong.”I looked ahead to the walls of my hotel room. Standing by the bed in my pajamas. I always felt silly in pajamas. The name of the hotel was Kouros, like the village, the island, the ship that provided passage to and from the island. Singly knit. The journey that shares the edges of destinations. Mikro Kamini, where the old man was found, means small furnace or kiln. I always felt a surge of childlike pride, knowing such things or figuring them out, even when a dead body was the occasion for my efforts. The first fragment of Greek I ever translated was a wall slogan in the middle of Athens. Death to Fascists. Once it took me nearly an hour, with a dictionary and book of grammar, to translate the directions on a box of Quaker Oats. Dick and Dot had to tell me where to buy cereal with multilingual instructions on the box."I have a feeling about night," Owen said. "The things of the world are no longer discrete. All the day's layers and distinctions fade in the dark. Night is continuous.”"It doesn't matter whether we lie or tell the truth," Kathryn said."Wonderful, yes, exactly.”Standing by the bed in my pajamas. Kathryn reading. How many nights, in our languid skin, disinclined toward talk or love, the dense hours behind us, we shared this moment, not knowing it was matter to share. It appeared to be nothing, bedtime once more, her pillowed head in fifty watts, except that these particulars, man standing, pages turning, the details repeated almost nightly, began to take on mysterious force. Here I am again, standing by the bed in my pajamas, acting out a memory. It was a memory that didn't exist independently. I recalled the moment only when I was repeating it. The mystery built around this fact, I think, that act and recollection were one. A moment of autobiography, a minimal frieze. The moment referred back to itself at the same time as it pointed forward. Here I am. A curious reminder that I was going to die. It was the only time in my marriage that I felt old, a specimen of oldness, a landmark, standing in those slightly oversized pajamas, a little ridiculous, reliving the same moment of the night before, Kathryn reading in bed, a dram of Greek brandy on the bedside table, another reference forward. I will die alone. Old, geologically. The lower relief of landforms. Olduvai.Who knows what this means? The force of the moment was in what I didn't know about it, standing there, the night tides returning, the mortal gleanings that filled the space between us, untellably, our bodies arranged for dreaming in loose-fitting clothes.Living alone I never felt it. Somehow the reference depended on the woman in the bed. Or maybe it's just that my days and nights had become less routine. Travel, hotels. The surroundings changed too often.

"An early night for Owen.”"Maybe an early season," she said. "The chairman of the graduate program paid a visit. He's been in Athens, conferring with the ASCS. A reevaluation is in progress. But it may be good news in the long run. We could get going again as early as April next year. May at the latest. That's the word.”"With Owen?”"With or without. Probably the latter. No one knows what Owen's plans are. It's this loose structure that's caused so much trouble around here.”"Trouble for everyone but you.”"Exactly. I'm the one who's benefited. And Owen is sure I'll be able to come back. So. At least we have a rough idea how things stand. It's what you've been wanting.”How easy it was to sit there and reorganize our lives across the jet streams and the seasons. We were full of ideas, having learned to interpret the failed marriage as an occasion for enterprise and personal daring. Kathryn was specially adept at this. She loved to round on a problem and make it work for her. We discussed her proposals, seeing in them not only distance and separation but a chance to exploit these. Fathers are pioneers of the skies. I thought of David Keller flying to New York to eat banana splits with his children in a midtown hotel. Then back across the sea to consolation and light, Lindsay tanning bare-breasted on their terrace.Kathryn and I agreed. She and Tap would go to London at summer's end. They would stay with her sister Margaret. They would find a school for Tap. Kathryn would take courses in archaeology and allied disciplines. And I would find it easy, if expensive, to visit. London was a three-hour flight from Athens, roughly seven hours closer than the island was."In April you return.”"I ought to be able to find a better house to rent, now that I know people here. And Tap will follow as soon as school is over. It could be worse.”"I'll get to see the Elgin marbles," I said.We also agreed I would sleep on the sofa that night. I didn't want to leave them alone after what had happened in the other village."I'll have to find clean sheets. We can put a chair at one end of the sofa. It's not long enough.”"I feel like a kid sleeping over.”"What excitement," she said. "I wonder if we can handle it.”"Is that a wishful note I hear?”"I don't know. Is it?”"An uncertainty, a suspense?”"It's not something we can sit around discussing, is it?”"Over local wine. We're stuck in a kind of mined landscape. It's easier when Owen is here. I admit it.”"Why do we bother?”"We were practical people in marriage. Now we're full of clumsy aspirations. Nothing has an outcome anymore. We've become vaguely noble, both of us. We refuse to do what's expedient.”"Maybe we're not as bad as we think. What an idea. Revolutionary.”"How would your Minoans have handled a situation like this?”"A quickie divorce probably.”"Sophisticated people.”"Certainly the frescoes make them out to be. Grand ladies. Slim-waisted and graceful. Utterly European. And those lively colors. So different from Egypt and all that frowning sandstone and granite. Perpetual ego.”"They didn't think in massive terms.”"They decorated household things. They saw the beauty in this. Plain objects. They weren't all games and clothes and gossip.”"I think I'd feel at home with the Minoans.”"Gorgeous plumbing.”"They weren't subject to overwhelming awe. They didn't take things that seriously.”"Don't go too far," she said. "There's the Minotaur, the labyrinth. Darker things. Beneath the lilies and antelopes and blue monkeys.”"I don't see it at all.”"Where have you looked?”"Only at the frescoes in Athens. Reproductions in books. Nature was a delight to them, not an angry or godlike force.”"A dig in north-central Crete has turned up signs of human sacrifice. No one's saying much. I think a chemical analysis of the bones is under way.”"A Minoan site?”"All the usual signs.”"How was the victim killed?”"A bronze knife was found. Sixteen inches long. Human sacrifice isn't new in Greece.”"But not Minoans.”"Not Minoans. They'll be arguing for years.”"Are the facts that easy to determine? What, thirty-five hundred years ago?”"Thirty-seven," she said.We sat facing the hill that loomed above the village. It didn't take me long to see how shallow my resistance was to this disclosure. Eager to believe the worst. Even as she was talking I felt the first wavelets break on the beach. Satisfaction. The cinnamon boys, boxing, the women white and proud in skirts like pleated bells. Always the self finds a place for its fulfillments, even in the Cretan wild, outside time and light. She said the knife had been found with the skeleton of the victim, a young man fetal on a raised structure. The priest who killed him was also found. He was right-handed and knew how to sever a neck artery neatly."How did the priest die?" I said."Signs of an earthquake and fire. The sacrifice was linked to this. They also found a pillar with a ditch around it to hold blood. Pillar crypts have been found elsewhere. Massive pillars with the sign of the double ax. There's your massiveness, James, after all. Hidden in the earth.”We were silent awhile."What does Owen say?”"I've tried to discuss this with Owen but he's weary of Minoans, it seems. He says the whole tremendous theme of bulls and bulls' horns is based on cuckoldry. All those elegant women were sneaking into the labyrinth to screw some Libyan deckhand.”I laughed. She reached over the candles, put a hand to my cheek, leaned forward, standing, and kissed me slowly. A moment that spoke only its own regretful ardor. Sweet enough and warm. A reminiscence.Observing the rules I stayed outside until she fixed up the sofa for me and went to bed. In the morning we would make it a point to talk of routine things.

Tap came to Athens for two days with his friend Rajiv and the boy's father, who was connected with the Department of Art History at Michigan State. I'd talked to him several times at the site, a heavyset man named Anand Dass, stern and friendly, moving impressively through the rubble in tennis shorts and a spotless cotton shirt. His son seemed always to be dancing around him, asking questions, grabbing hold of the man's arm, his hand, even the loops in his belt, and I wondered whether Rajiv's fourteen months in America and five weeks in Greece had put him at such a bewildering distance from the sum of known things that only his father's dark anchoring bulk could ease the disquiet.He was a likable boy, he bounced when he walked, Tap's age but taller, and he wore flared trousers for his trip to Athens. I met them in Piraeus, a bleached-out day, empty and still. It was my notion to give the boys an auto tour of Athens but I kept getting lost. Beyond the central landmarks the streets looked identical. The modern apartment blocks, the bright awnings over the balconies, the walls marked with acronyms of political parties, an occasional old sepia building with a terra-cotta roof.Anand sat next to me talking about the island. There had been no water at all for two days. A dry southerly was blowing fine sand over everything. The only fruits and vegetables in the village stalls were those grown on the island itself. It would be a month before he was back in East Lansing. Green. Trees and lawns."You might have picked an easier place to dig.”"This is Owen," he said. "Owen is famous for this. He thinks he is going to India next. I told him forget it, you know. You won't get funding, you won't get permission, you will die in the heat. He pays no attention to weather, this man.”"He enjoys the sense of ordeal.”"He enjoys it. This is exactly true.”We cruised down endless streets, near deserted. Two men walked along biting into peaches, heads jutting and twisted, their bodies drawn awkwardly back to escape the spill."You know what happened," Anand said.He'd changed his voice in such a way that I knew immediately what he was referring to."I was there.”"But it wasn't the first. There was another about a year ago. Another island. Donoussa.”"I don't know the name.”"It's in the Cyclades. Small. A mail boat once a week from Naxos.”The boys were speaking Ob in the back seat."A hammer," he said. "It was a young girl. From very poor people. She was crippled. She had some kind of paralysis. I heard it just before I left. Someone from Donoussa was in the village near the dig.”I turned a corner into a traffic jam. A man stood outside his car with hands on hips to look ahead to the source of the trouble. A figure of transcendent disgust. There were buses, trolley buses, taxis, horns blaring, then stopping almost simultaneously, then blaring again, as if to suggest a form for this ordeal-a stately panic. Rajiv asked his father where we were and Tap said, "Lo-bost obin spobace.”It took half an hour to find our first destination, the apartment building where friends of Anand lived and where he and his son would spend the night. The following evening we would all go to the airport. Rajiv was flying to Bombay with these friends, a young couple. His mother would meet him there and they would go to Kashmir, where Anand's family had a summer home.After we'd dropped them, Tap said, "Can we drive around some more?”"I bought food. I think we ought to go home and eat it.”"I like driving around.”"I showed you the wrong stuff. We'll do better tomorrow.”"Can we just drive?”"Don't you want to see things?”"We'll see things while we drive. I like driving.”"You're not driving. I'm driving. Aimless driving. Will the island still be fun with Rajiv gone?”"I'm staying.”"One of these days you'll be going back to school.”"They're still digging. When they stop I'll go to school.”"You like the hard life. You're a couple of hardy people. Soon she'll be dressing you in animal skins.”"It'll have to be donkeys or cats. There must be a million cats there.”"I can see the two of you sailing around the world in a boat made of reeds and cat hair. Who needs school?”He looked out the window for a while."How come you don't have to work?”"I'll stick my head in the door around noon tomorrow. Things are quiet now. It's Ramadan. That affects the pace of things in the countries where most of our business is.”"Wait, don't tell me.”"It's an Islamic month.”"I said wait. Couldn't you wait?”"All right, what are people not allowed to do during Ramadan?”"They're not allowed to eat.”"They're not allowed to eat till sundown. Then they eat.”"Think of some more.”"We're almost home. I notice you've got Rajiv speaking Ob. Does your mother think you're overdoing it a bit?”"She hasn't said anything. I learned it from her, don't forget.”"If you become Ob-sessed, I blame her. Is that the idea?”He turned to me abruptly, a little wild-eyed."Don't tell me what that's called. I'm thinking. Just wait, okay?”When I pulled up it was nearly dark. The concierge stood outside the building, a man about my age with the forceful dark look of his profession, organized loitering. They were arrayed along the sidewalk, four or five of them, thumbing their amber beads, men of inevitability and fate, presences. They stare into the middle distance. Sometimes they gather at the barber shop, serious talk, dipping their knees in turn. They attend the entrances, they sit in the marble lobbies. A man or woman walking down the street, someone of interest for whatever reason to the concierges, is passed in effect from one to the other, a stray plane tracked to the pole. Not that they are curious. The barest scattering from a common center moves them only to suspicion. Cars come and go, people wait at the bus stop, a man paints the wall across the street. This is enough for anyone.But Niko had never seen my son. His arms went up. He came forward to open the door on the passenger's side, smiling widely.Children were the full becoming. They stirred a mystical joy in people. They were centered, always in light, in aura, scooped up, dandled, sung to, adored. Niko spoke Greek to Tap as he'd never spoken to me, with vigor and warmth, eyes shining. I see my son in the small tumult of the moment. He knows he has to handle this alone and does it conscientiously enough, shaking the man's hand, nodding madly. He is not experienced at hearty rapport, of course, but his effort is meticulous and touching. He knows the man's pleasure is important. He has seen this everywhere on the island and he has listened to his mother. We must be more precise in the details of our responses. This is how we let people know we understand the seriousness and dignity of their feelings. Life is different here. We must be equal to the largeness of things.

At the airport the next evening I stood with Rajiv and Tap under the status board, talking about the destinations and wondering what Rajiv saw when he came across words like Benghazi and Khartoum. I wondered what Tap saw."Will you be glad to go back to India for good?" I said. "Your father thinks sometime next year.”"Yes, I'll be glad. It's not so cold and I like school there. We run races and I'm very fast.”"Is he very fast, Tap?”"He's pretty fast. He's faster than a three-legged dog.”"So this is good. He has one more leg than I.”"What will you study when you get back?" I said.He held his breath at most questions. His face grew intense, he evaluated the implications, the depths of meaning. I watched him puff up his chest as he prepared to deliver an answer."Mathematics. Hindi. Sanskrit. English.”Later I watched from a distance as Anand said goodbye to the boy. Being a father seemed his natural talent. There was something reassuring in him, a strong settling presence that must have made Rajiv feel his aircraft would glide toward the Arabian Sea on the soft air of his own father's commanding. The boy was preparing to enter hushed places. Out of this bedlam of departing people and the voices that gather around them, he would take an escalator down to the area restricted to passengers. The people with documents, the lounge, the softer chairs, the more purposeful waiting. At the boarding gate, the last of the static chambers, the stillness is more compact, the waiting narrowed. He will notice hands and eyes, the covers of books, a man with a turban and netted beard. The crew is Japanese, the security Japanese, all this planned by his father. He hears Tamil, Hindi, and begins curiously to feel a sense of apartness, something in the smell of the place, the amplified voice in the distance. It doesn't feel like earth. And then aboard, even softer seats. He will feel the systems running power through the aircraft, running light, running air. To the edge of the stratosphere, world hum, the sudden night. Even the night seems engineered, Japanese, his brief sleep calmed by the plane's massive heartbeat. The journey is a muted pause between the noise of Athens and the roiling voice of Bombay.We went to the observation deck.He was traveling with two people he knew. Still, it was a considerable event for a nine-year-old, a separation based on thrust, speed and altitude, fiercer, more intense for this reason than the parting of the following day, when Tap would go with Anand back to the island.It was an hour to sunset. Tap had a secret eye on a group of men in leisure suits and Arab dress, talking softly. A dense light lay on the gulf. Faint shapes in the haze, destroyers and merchant ships. We watched the planes take off."I heard something else," Anand said. "They were there a long, long time. Do you know about the rock shelter?”"Which island are we talking about?”"Kouros. There were three men, one woman. In a rock shelter.”"Owen told me.”"They were there a long time. Through the entire winter if you can imagine it. The murder on Donoussa was a year ago. I don't know for a fact that there were any foreigners on Donoussa then. There was a murder, that's all I know. Same type of weapon.”He was looking out toward the runway."Several questions," I said. "Did you ever see these people? Around the dig, in the village nearby? Did you ever go up toward the monastery? Owen told you what they look like, didn't he, how they dress?”"I never saw people like this anywhere on the island. The island is a damned uninteresting place. Who comes? That's a nice enough village where Kathryn rented the house. But what else is there? You never see anyone. Greeks come now and then. Old French or German couples. These people would stand out. Believe it.”"How do you know they spent the winter in that cave?”"Owen told me. Who else? He's the only one who's seen them.”"Anand, they didn't drop out of the sky. Other people must have seen them. They had to step off a boat. They had to make their way to the shelter.”"Maybe they arrived at different times, one by one, and they were not so disheveled then, or filthy and hungry. No one noticed.”"He didn't tell me they were there for such a long period.”"Owen is selective," Anand said. "You mustn't be hurt.”We laughed. Tap made his way closer, pointing toward the runway. We saw a 747 lift slowly in the silver haze, the blast wave reaching us before the plane banked over the gulf. Anand watched it out of sight. Then we walked down to the car and headed back to Athens."They were eating," Tap said."Who was eating?”"The Arabs at the airport when we were waiting for the plane to take off. They had food.”"So what?”"It's Ramadan.”"That's right, it is," I said."The sun was still out.”"But maybe they're not Muslims.”"They looked like Muslims.”"What does a Muslim look like?”"He doesn't look like you or me.”"The first year I taught in the States," Anand said, "they all wanted to come to me for lessons in meditation. A Hindu. They wanted me to teach them how to breathe.”"Did you know how to breathe?”"I didn't know how to breathe. I still don't know. What a joke. They wanted to control their alpha waves. They thought I could tell them how to do this.”All through dinner Anand talked about religion with Tap. Undreamed sights. Vultures circling the towers of silence, where Parsees leave their dead. Jains wearing gauze over their mouths to keep from breathing insects and killing them. Serious people, Tap saw. He was enjoying himself, his fork in a melon wedge in the garden taverna. He grew watchful and still as Anand described ash-gray men wandering naked with begging bowl and staff, holy men, sadhus, walking out their lives in mud and dust.I kept waiting for Tap to ask about his own religion, if he'd ever had one or if his parents had and what happened to it if they had. We were doubters, I might have told him. Skeptics of the slightly superior type. The Christian dispersion. It was one of many things Kathryn and I agreed on, rockbound doubt, not that we'd ever discussed it. It was just there, or not there, something we knew about each other. The quasi-stellar object, the quantum event, these were the sources of our speculation and wonder. Our bones were made of material that came swimming across the galaxy from exploded stars. This knowledge was our shared prayer, our chant. The grim inexplicable was there, the god-mass looming. If we see God as a being, I might have said to Tap, the only true response is the wandering sadhu's. Go naked in a scatter of ashes, stand in the burning sun. If there is God, how could we fail to submit completely? Existence would be decrease, going clean. And adding beauty to the world, Kathryn might say. To her the spectacle had merit even if the source was obscure. They would be beautiful to see, leaning on staffs, mind-scorched, empty-eyed, men in the dust of India, lips moving to the endless name of God.The alphabet.Later I sat alone outside, hearing the day-end noise die slowly, voices in the terrace restaurants, the two-part drone of insects in the cypress trees. True night. The Doppler bursts of motorcycles taking the hill.Anand had said the island was safe, he was sure of it, they were gone. I asked him how many times Owen had been to the rock shelter. Many. But Owen had told me he saw them only once; when he went back a second time, they were gone. Anand said he was in a position to know about Owen's absences from the site. Owen had seen them more than once. Believe it.Early the next morning I watched their boat move off. A full day's trip even if the connecting boat was on time. Already Kathryn would be at the site, picking away with a grapefruit knife and tweezers. "Sherding" they called it. Washing the finds. Boxing the finds. Labeling the boxes. And she'd be on the roof when the boat came into view, a flashlight rigged above her record sheets, her cross-section drawings of the scarp.Each blazing day she grew into something slightly newer. The wind blew so hot it stripped the bougainvillea of flowers. Water was being rationed, the phones were out. But the conservator was back, gluing pots together, giving them chemical baths. There was activity. One of the students was sinking a trench in the olive grove. Things were not finished. There were always finds to make.She would walk down to the dock and watch him come off the boat with his knapsack and half smile.Home.

Through Istanbul the long cabs passed in the gloom, Olds 88s, Buick Roadmasters, Chrysler limousines, DeSotos with busted mufflers, the Detroit overstocks of the decades, a city of dead cars. From the air all the cities looked like brown storms collecting, traps of heat and dust. Rowser sent me to Cairo for one day to finish an update for the local associate, a man who'd suffered a stroke in the lobby of the Sheraton. Cairo the radarless airport, Cairo the flocks of red-dyed sheep crossing downtown streets, the roofless buses, people hanging over the sides. In Karachi there was barbed wire, broken glass cemented to the tops of walls, trucks carrying trees in burlap sacking. Military governments always plant trees. It shows their gentle side.In the Istanbul Hilton I ran into a man named Lane, a lawyer who did work for the Mainland Bank. The day before he'd run into Walid Hassan, one of David Keller's credit officers, at the Inter-Con in Amman. I'd last seen Hassan in Lahore, the Hilton, where we'd run into each other at the front desk, each of us signing a document allowing us to have a drink in the bar that lay behind an unmarked door off the lobby. In the bar we ran into a man named Case, who was Lane's boss.Case had come from Nairobi with a one-sentence story. When Kampala fell to the Tanzanian forces, people greeted them with flowers and fruit and beat their own captured troops to death in the street.All these places were one-sentence stories to us. Someone would turn up, utter a sentence about foot-long lizards in his hotel room in Niamey, and this became the solid matter of the place, the means we used to fix it in our minds. The sentence was effective, overshadowing deeper fears, hesitancies, a rife disquiet. There was around us almost nothing we knew as familiar and safe. Only our hotels rising from the lees of perennial renovation. The sense of things was different in such a way that we could only register the edges of some elaborate secret. It seemed we'd lost our capacity to select, to ferret out particularity and trace it to some center which our minds could relocate in knowable surroundings. There was no equivalent core. The forces were different, the orders of response eluded us. Tenses and inflections. Truth was different, the spoken universe, and men with guns were everywhere.The one-sentence stories dealt with our passing grievances or small embarrassments. This was the humor of hidden fear.

Back in Athens I went around to visit Charles Maitland in his apartment. He lived on a quiet street lined with oleanders about a block and a half away from me, just below the library of the American School of Classical Studies. It was his habit, opening the door to someone, to turn immediately and shuffle toward the living room, leaving the caller slightly unsure of his welcome. The gesture had the assurance and precision of superior breeding behind it but all it meant was that Charles grew impatient with conversation in doorways.It was a small apartment with many objects from Africa and the Middle East. He was just back from Abu Dhabi, where he'd been discussing alarm systems for refineries."Are they killing Americans?" I said.He sat by the window, shirt unbuttoned, in slippers, drinking a beer. A copy of Jane's Fighting Ships was on the floor near his feet. I made myself a drink and wandered along the bookshelves."I want them to use magnetic sensors," he said. "They're reluctant, it seems. The usual convoluted process. I've passed through a hundred partitioned offices. What are you drinking? Did I make that?”"You don't know how.”"Don't look at my books. It makes me nervous when people do that. I feel I ought to follow along, pointing out which ones were gifts from fools and misfits.”"They're Ann's books, most of them.”"When will you finally cast aside this way of seeing? It's defeating, you know.”"You're two distinct people, aren't you? They're hers, most of them. You read manuals, specification sheets.”"Tell me about Cairo," he said. "There's a city for you.”"Forty degrees Celsius.”"Nine million people. You need at least nine million people before you've earned the right to call yourself a city. The heat is impressive, isn't it?”"The sand is impressive. There was an old man with a broom sweeping sand off one of the airport roads.”"Damn it, I miss the sand. He was sweeping it back, was he, into the desert? Good man.”"I was only there a day.”"That's all it takes. Great cities take a day. This is the test of a great city. The traffic, the sewage, the heat, the telephones. Marvelous. Get David to tell you about the traffic in Tehran. Now there's traffic for you. There's a city.”"I've heard him.”Hacking laughter."They're all coming out, you know.”They'd been coming out in Pan Am 747s, in VC10s, in Hercules C-130s, in C-141 StarLifters. They flew to Rome, Frankfurt, Cyprus, Athens.Tennant heard gunfire as he left Tehran for the airport. It was the tenth straight day of gunfire for Tennant. People in Mashhad counted six straight days. Iran Oil Services chartered planes for the oilfield personnel and their families. Five hundred people arrived in Athens one day. Three hundred the next.Athens took on the soft glow of an executive refuge, an old storytelling kingdom where men from many lands gathered to weave their tales of gunfire and chanting mobs. We who lived there began to feel we hadn't fully appreciated the place. Stability was rare, it seemed, in the cities of the eastern Med, the Gulf, well beyond. Here was our own model of democratic calm.They would come on scheduled flights out of Beirut, Tripoli, Baghdad, out of Islamabad and Karachi, out of Bahrain, Muscat, Kuwait and Dubai, the wives and children of businessmen and diplomats, causing room shortages in Athens hotels, adding stories, new stories all the time. This would happen in the first month of the new Islamic year. The men staying behind were encouraged by their embassies to take vacations, at the very least to stay indoors whenever possible. The first month was the holy month.From the window I watched a priest come down a sidestreet toward the building. They moved like ships, these men in their black cassocks and cylindrical hats, wide and rocking. Sunday."Why aren't you flying your plane?”"Should I be?”"Ever since I've been here you've gone out on Sundays.”"Ann thinks I'm trying to develop a sense of ruined dignity.It would be impaired, this sense, if I were to stand in a dusty field with a model plane buzzing about my head. There's nothing ruined in such a scene. It's merely pathetic. When older men do certain things alone, it means you must pity them. Things boys are thought to do. There's something suspect in this whirling ship of mine. That's the theory.”"Not Ann's theory.”"It's a theory. I haven't finished shaving, my shirt is open. All ways to enlarge my ruined dignity, according to her.”"Is she right?”"They're her books," he said evenly."Business problems. Are you having trouble coming up with assignments?”He waved a hand."Because I can always talk to Rowser.”"Spare me.”"He's not so bad. Once you understand the way his mind works.”"How does his mind work?”"On-off, zero-one.”"Binary. How do minds in general work? Anyone's. Christ, we're out of beer. Are there stores open seven days a week after death?”The tribal mask was wood and horsehair, grimacing. Heavy-lidded eyes, geometric nose. I almost told Charles about the murders in the Cyclades. But going over it mentally I found the subject so closely tied to Owen Brademas there was little to say without bringing him into it. A character study of Owen would be necessary. The material was his, the suggestion of a sense behind the killings. I didn't think I was up to providing a background, on a sleepy late-summer day, and Charles appeared in no mood to take one in."I don't mind working for Rowser at all," I said. "I told Kathryn. This is where I want to be. History. It's in the air. Events are linking all these countries. What do we talk about over dinner, all of us? Politics basically. That's what it comes down to. Money and politics. And that's my job. Yours too.”"I'm in the world, granted. I've always been in the world. But I don't know that I like it anymore.”"All of us. We're important suddenly. Isn't it something you feel? We're right in the middle. We're the handlers of huge sums of delicate money. Recyclers of petrodollars. Builders of refineries. Analysts of risk. You say you're in the world. That's profound, Charles. I wouldn't have reacted to that a year ago. I would have nodded absentmindedly. It means something to me now. I came here to be close to my family and I'm finding something more. Seeing them. But also just being here. The world is here. Don't you feel that? In some of these places, things have enormous power. They have impact, they're mysterious. Events have weight. It's all gathering. I told Kathryn. Men running in the streets. People. I don't mean I want to see it blow up. It's a heightening, that's all. When the Mainland Bank makes a proposal to one of these countries, when David flies to Zurich to meet with the Turkish finance minister, he gets a feeling, he turns a little pinker than he already is, his breath comes faster. Action, risk. It's not a loan to some developer in Arizona. It's much broader, it has a serious frame. Everything here is serious. And we're in the middle.”"How do minds work?" he said."What?”"What does the latest research show?”"I don't know what you're talking about.”"It's in the air. It's history. It's turning pinker all the time.”His voice had the abruptness of someone who talks to strangers in the subway. It was naked. There was an element of injured self in it. Whatever the tone indicated, I didn't think there was any point in responding.I went out to the terrace. It was one of those sandblasted days. The city was achromatic, very dense and still. A woman came out of a building and walked slowly down the street. She was the only person in sight, the one thing moving. In the emptiness and glare there was a mystery about her. Tall, a dark dress, a shoulder bag. Locusts droning. The brightness, the slow afternoon. I stood watching. She stepped off the curbstone without looking back this way. No cars, no sound of cars. Was it the empty street that made her such an erotic figure, the heat and time of day? She drew things toward her. Her shadow gave a depth to things. She was walking in the street and even this was powerful and alluring, an act that had erotic force. The body presumes on the machine. An arrogance that's sensual. That nothing else moved into view, that she walked with a lazy sway, that her dress was the kind of fabric that clings, that her buttocks were hard and tight, that the moment of her passage in the sun went by so slowly, all these things made sexual drama. They weighed on me. They put me in a near trance of longing. That's what she was, hypnotic, walking down the middle of the street. Long slow empty quiet Sundays. When I was a boy these were the days I hated. Now I looked forward to them. Prolonged moments, dead calm. I needed this one day, I'd found, of simply being.Ann was in the living room when I went back inside. Her face seemed bleached, eyes large and pale. She held a drink."Don't look at me.”"I thought you were out," I said. "On the phone Charles said you were at the flower market.”"It closes at two. I got here just before you did actually.”"Been hiding from me.”"I suppose I have.”"Where is Charles?”"Napping.”"What an interesting couple. They take turns disappearing.”"Sorry, James, really.”"I ought to be going anyway.”"Don't be so glum. What are you drinking?”"You're having problems then.”"That's the nature of the beast, isn't it? Our son is planning a visit. Peter. We'll repair it by then. Our duty is clear. Did you notice, he didn't finish shaving? He always seems on the verge of doing some great sort of comic turn. He lapses into comedy all the time. I wonder if he knows. The man's actually a gifted comic. I mean half shaven. He won't let me go with him to fly his plane. He doesn't want to be seen.”There was a ready-made quality about the way she spoke. Tired nonstop fluency. It came raining out. Tension and fatigue made her overbright, almost frantically eager to string sentences together, any sentences. She used pitch as an element of meaning. What she said was beside the point. It was the cadences that mattered, the rise and fall of the ironic voice, the modulations, the stresses. What we lacked was a subject."Have we spoken since Nairobi? I came back with some wonderful dirty words. My sister collects them for Charles. The life they lead, let me tell you. A house servant, a gardener, a man for the horses, a night guard, a day guard. But there's no butter, there's no milk.”Her eyes wouldn't meet mine."The Tennants are here, you know. We'll all go to dinner this week. They don't much like it here. They want to go back to Tehran. They're determined, regardless of danger.”She'd met the Tennants in Beirut. Earlier they'd lived in New York. In four years there, the Tennants said, no one ever bothered them. No one was rude or abusive. They were never threatened or mugged. They walked everywhere, they said in a tone that pretended to wonder why such a thing should be considered remarkable. This is what people said when they wanted to pay formal tribute to New York.We walked everywhere."I feel sad for them," she said. "They were only just getting the feel. It takes more time in some places than others. I mean when people aren't shooting, of course. When they're shooting, you just go about your business, head down. You don't have to worry about getting the feel or learning the rhythm. It's all rather dramatically done for you. Where you can go, when you can go there.”In Beirut she used to go all the way to the airport to mail a letter. Some days they'd put it in a box, some days they'd give it back to her. In the end this is what brought them out. It wasn't the local hepatitis, the cholera to the north, even the steady gunfire. It was the arbitrary nature of things. Moods and whims. Nothing the same two days running. Stray events. Life shaped by men whose actions had the wanton force of some sudden tuf ñ in nature. Often the men themselves didn't know how they would act from one moment to the next and this put her on constant edge. She couldn't follow the thoughts behind the eyes. Checkpoints, men's eyes. The women kept washing floors. It seemed to be what they did in difficult times. During the worst of the fighting they kept on washing floors. They washed floors long after the floors were clean. The uniform motions, the even streaks. Unvarying things, she saw, must have deeper value than we know."Don't look at me," she said again."You're not so hard to look at, you know.”"Stop. I'll be a grandmother one of these days.”"Is Peter married?”"Hardly. He tends to be dithery in his relations with people. I wish I could learn that kind of indecisiveness myself. Forever plunging. That's your Ann Maitland, dearie.”"Should we talk, you and I?”"I thought men talked to other men. You know, buy each other foaming mugs of stout, do a little back-slapping. Things look better in the morning sort of thing.”"Charles isn't talking.”"No, he isn't, is he? He'd much rather sleep.”"Charlie's baffled.”"It's just an affair," she said. "I've had others.”"I wonder what I say to that.”"Nothing. We'll repair it. We have in the past. It requires sequences that have to be completed, one after the other. Distinct stages of development. The funny thing is I haven't learned the drill as well as he has. I do badly at it. I make things difficult for all concerned. Poor James. I'm sorry.”The voice was her own now, reflective and balanced, connected to something. She leaned forward to touch my hand. The world is here, I thought.

At first I thought the concierge was ten or fifteen years older than I was. The small girl clinging to his leg I took to be a granddaughter. It was a while before I saw I would have to adjust the relative levels, bring his age down, mine up. Most Greek men at forty seem totally fixed, part of the settled earth, assigned by time and custom to a particular set of duties, a certain face, a walk, a way of saying and doing. I was still waiting to be surprised by life. I was always coming or going, he was there, out on the sidewalk or behind his desk in the dark lobby, doing his records, drinking coffee.He didn't know a word of English. My Greek was so tentative and insecure I began to wish I could avoid the man. But it wasn't possible to get by him without a sentence or two passing between us. He might ask about Tap, remark on the weather. Understanding him, answering correctly, was like making my way through a dream. I used to squint into his face, trying to pick a word out of the surge and glut, something that might give me a clue to what the subject was.Hot.Hot.Very hot.If I came into the lobby with groceries in a clear plastic bag he'd look over from his slot behind the desk and name the items one by one. At times I found myself repeating what he said or even saying the words before he did, when I knew them. I would lift the bag slightly as I walked by, making it easier for him to see. Bread, milk, potatoes, butter. The concierge had this power over me. He had the advantage, the language, and what I felt most often, passing in or out of his presence, was a childlike fear and guilt.Aside from a limited vocabulary I had severe shortcomings when it came to pronunciation. Place-names were a special problem. Whenever I got off the elevator with a suitcase, Niko would ask where I was going. Sometimes he did this with a small hand-twisting gesture. A simple thing, destination, but often I had difficulty telling him. Either I'd forget the Greek word or I'd have trouble pronouncing it. I'd put the accent in the wrong place, mess up the x sound, the r that follows the t. The word would come out flat and pale, a Minnesota city, and I'd head off to the airport feeling I'd been unable to satisfy some obscure requirement.In time I began to lie. I would tell him I was going to a place that had a name I could easily pronounce. What a simple, even elegant device this seemed. Let the nature of the place-name determine the place. I felt childish, of course. This was part of his power over me. But the lies began to worry me after a while in a way that had nothing to do with childishness. There was something metaphysically disturbing about them. A grave misplacement. They were not simple but complex. What was I tampering with, the human faith in naming, the lifelong system of images in Niko's brain? I was leaving behind in the person of the concierge an enormous discrepancy between my uttered journey and the actual movements I made in the external world, a four-thousand-mile fiction, a deep lie. The lie was deeper in Greek than it would have been in English. I knew this without knowing why. Could reality be phonetic, a matter of gutturals and dentals? The smoky crowded places where we did business were not always as different to us as the names assigned to them. We needed the names to tell them apart, in a sense, and I was playing fast and loose with this curious truth. And when I returned, how foolish I felt as he asked me how things had gone in England, Italy or Japan. Retribution. I might have been wishing an air crash on myself or an earthquake on an innocent city, the city whose name I had uttered.I also lied when I went to Turkey. I could handle the word for Turkey, it was one of my better words, but I didn't want Niko to know I went there. He looked political.That night I thought of Ann, the cities she'd lived in, what kind of bargains she'd struck with her husband and lovers. I thought of her affairs, sentimentally, as preparations for the loss she knew was coming. It was her husband's job that took her to a place, then took her away. Places, always places. Her memory was part of the consciousness of lost places, a darkness that ran deep in Athens. There were Cypriots here, Lebanese, Armenians, Alexandrians, the island Greeks, the northern Greeks, the old men and women of the epic separation, their children, grandchildren, the Greeks of Smyrna and Constantinople. Their true home was to the spacious east, the dream, the great idea. Everywhere the pressure of remembrance. The black memory of civil war, children starving. Through the mountains we see it in the lean faces of men in flyspeck villages, stubble on their jaws. They sit beneath the meter on the café wall. There's a bleakness in their gazing, an unrest. How many dead in your village? Sisters, brothers. The women walk past with donkeys carrying bricks. There were times when I thought Athens was a denial of Greece, literally a paving over of this blood memory, the faces gazing out of stony landscapes. As the city grew it would consume the bitter history around it until nothing was left but gray streets, the six-story buildings with laundry flying from the rooftops. Then I realized the city itself was an invention of people from lost places, people forcibly resettled, fleeing war and massacre and each other, hungry, needing jobs. They were exiled home, to Athens, which spread toward the sea and over the lesser hills out into the Attic plain, direction-seeking. A compass rose of memory.