The Names

7

I met her in a café in Kolonaki Square, a place where all Athenians who feel they are worth seeing eventually show up to be seen, where the women have pouty ultraviolet mouths, the uniform is leather, the chains are gold, the futuristic object parked at the corner is a De Tomaso Pantera, the command car of idle fantasy, and the slender bearded men shift in their chairs, behind dark glasses, wearing sweaters draped over their shoulders.Ann, approaching, tilted her head to catch my eye. The warm smile held an edge of reproof."Where have you been? Said she accusingly.”"Making the rounds. The Gulf and points north. Many wonders.”"You might have mentioned it, you beast.”"It was chaos, honest. I had barely enough time to arrange visas.”"You wanted us to worry," she said."Ridiculous.”"You wanted us to think you'd simply run off, run away, given it all up, given us up.”"Did you call my secretary?”"Charlie did.”"Then you knew.”"Eventually," she said, using the word to indicate I was taking this more seriously than I was supposed to.The main cafes and their auxiliaries were crowded into a noisy slanted space that included a small park, traffic melees, three or four kiosks layered and seamed in bright magazines. The first mild day after a grim spell. The canopies were furled to let in light, the tables extended across the sidewalks. Celebration and release. An old woman turned the crank of a barrel organ while her husband moved among the tables collecting coins. People had the happy air of survivors eager to talk of their common ordeal. Waiters moved sideways. The lottery man stood at the edge of things, bearing his notched stave."How nice to be back," I said. "I want to do nothing, go nowhere. A sunny winter. That's what I want. Orange trees on every street. Women in self-important boots.”"Wait until the wind starts blowing. You're high enough on Lycabettus to get the full effect.”"I want to pass time. Sit in places like this, talk about nothing.”"I have to confess I find it hard to pass time in the heart of the city. I need a seascape or vista.”"I could easily fall into this," I said. "Laze my way through life. Coffee here, wine there. You can channel significant things into the commonplace. Or you can avoid them completely.”"I wouldn't have thought you were a café wastrel.”"We all are. It's just a matter of realizing it. I'm preparing myself for the bleak years ahead. A lonely sad expatriate. Wifeless. Stumbling through seedy cafés. A friend of mine imagined a similar fate only yesterday. It involved dry cleaning. What does it all mean?”"I don't know. Self-depreciation is a language I don't think I understand. It's so often a form of ego, isn't it, a form of aggression, a wanting to be noticed even for one's flaws. I don't know these modern languages. In fact I may be the person in your fantasy. The sad expatriate. The real one.”Men stood before the kiosks reading displays of the day's papers. The waiter opened a half bottle of wine. I smiled at Ann, turning my head, making it a look of measurement, evaluation. A look of the left eye."Is it possible, love affairs as functions of geography?”She looked back, showing amused interest."Possibly you want to deepen the experience of a place. A place you know you will have to leave some day, most likely not by choice.”"That hadn't occurred to me," she said. "Adulterous sex as a function of geography. Do I have such obscure motives?”"The loss of Kenya, the loss of Cyprus. You want to keep something for yourself that isn't a tribal mask or figurine. A private Cyprus, a meditation. How does a woman make these places hers as well as her husband's when after all it's his job that determines where they go, and when they go, and when they leave.”"A function of memory. I might buy that. Some women have a way of planning their memories.”"Isn't there a connection? Geography and memory?”"You're drifting away from me.”"You're a plain girl from a mill town. I know.”"Of course there is sheer sense pleasure. Are we allowed to take that into account? Excitement.”"That's another subject. I don't find that subject agreeable.”"You want to maintain a certain decorum.”"A certain level. I don't want to succumb to jealousy. A man has jealous thoughts about a woman he's never loved, a woman who's simply a friend. He doesn't want to hear about sense pleasures. He's interested in her affairs as themes, motifs in her life.”"Just the conversation," she said, "for Kolonaki Square.”"You don't have to hate a man to enjoy his bad luck. True? And you don't have to love a woman to feel possessive toward her or resentful of her affairs.”"I don't know how serious you are. Are you serious?”"Of course I'm serious.”"Well how nice. I think.”"I hadn't thought of it as nice or not nice.”"Or do I make a mistake in regarding myself as specially favored?”"Probably you make a mistake. I have a history of pathological envy.”She laughed."You have too much time to think, James. You're alone too much, aren't you?”"And you?”"Wherever we've been I've managed to find things to do. Not much but enough. English lessons in the beginning. Of course I was a full-time mother and housekeeper for quite a few years. I do occasional work for the British Council here. Translation mainly. It does make a difference. I need to feel that I'm building little blocks of time. That's why the café life will never claim me.”"Have you ever thought being alone might be in some way a fullness, a completion?”"No, absolutely.”"I believe deeply in the idea of two. Two people. It's the only sanity. The only richness.”"Of course.”"Yesterday I was in Amman, sitting in the Roman theater, and I had an odd sensation. I don't know if I can describe it but I think I perceived solitude as a collection of things rather than an absence of things. Being alone has components. I felt I was being put together out of these nameless things. This was new to me. Of course I'd been traveling, running around. This was the first quiet moment I'd had. Maybe that's all it was. But I felt I was being put together. I was alone and absolutely myself.”"Terrifying. Not that I know what you're talking about," she said.A young man fell into the chair next to Ann's, crossed his legs, folded his arms and eased into the slouch of a ten-hour wait, the slouch of cancelled flights, half-sleep in vast rooms.This was Peter, her son, a pointed face, curly reddish hair, wireframe specs. He wore a checked sport coat that was a couple of sizes too large, a country gentleman's outfit with pockets for shotgun shells or corn cobs to toss to the pigs. He wanted to see a menu."In modern travel there are no artists-only critics," he told me."You're tired," Ann said."On the one hand there's nothing new to make of all this. On the other there's so much to dismiss as overrated or plain rotten. My critical sense has been given a confident charge these past weeks. It does something for a person's self-esteem when he is able to judge entire land masses as second-rate.”The Far East, from which direction Peter had come, put him in a particular mood of censure. There was a great deal of energy in his observations and it seemed to hang above the fallen body like a posthumous glow."Incidentally the phone rang as I was walking out the door. Athens is evidently a place where you pick up a ringing phone and it keeps ringing.”I asked him what kind of mathematics he did. He couldn't decide whether or not to tell me. He did mention that at Berkeley he was in a favorable position to study two of the esoteric wonders of our time, subjects only an adept might begin to penetrate. Pure mathematics and the state of California. There were no analogies from the real world that might help him explain either of these. He began to disappear beneath the table."Who was it?" she said."What.”"Who was on the telephone?”"Well when I realized it wouldn't stop ringing I put it down. But he rang back. Greek fellow. Wrong number.”She tilted the wine bottle to read the label."It's a way of life, wrong numbers," I said. "Telephones constantly change hands. People buy them, inherit them. I learn more Greek talking to people who've dialed the wrong number-”Finally Charles showed up, returning us briefly to our careless pace. He talked about recent arrivals and departures, local politics, Swahili curses and obscenities, growling these last into the hand that clutched his cigarette. The single oddness he conveyed, a man staying strong as he wears away, an appearance of robust corrosion, was always more apparent when I hadn't seen him for a time."Your son won't tell me what sort of mathematics he does. If you explain that I used to do technical writing now and then, he may consider speaking to me.”"Technical writing. He deals in truth and beauty. That's the wrong thing to say, James. Technical writing.”"I only mean I'm familiar with some of the nomenclature. I may be able to distinguish one discipline from another.”"He's not impressed," Charles said. "Look at him.”"Unimpressed. What can I do to prove myself? Give me a test.”Ann was in conversation with someone at the next table. We were all passing time."There is no test," Charles said. "The only test is mathematics. You've got to know the secrets. Look at him. He speaks to no one. He says he's not able to talk about it. There are certain things he can't discuss with his professors. It's too bloody rarefied. It makes no sense if you don't know the secrets, the codes. It means nothing, says nothing, refers to nothing, is in fact absolutely useless.”Peter Maitland ate his lunch."It doesn't bear on human experience, human progress, ordinary human language," Charles said. "It must be a form of zoology. It's a branch of zoology. The great ape branch. That's why men are teaching apes to communicate. So we can discuss mathematics with them." They'd been through this before. "It's interesting in itself, you see. It refers to itself and only itself. It's the pure exercise of the mind. It's Rosicrucianism, druids in hoods. The formal balances, that's what counts. The patterns, the structures. It's the inner consistencies we have to search for. The symmetries, the harmonies, the mysteries, the whisperies. Good Christ, Axton, you can't expect the man to talk about these things.”Peter said to his mother across a forkful of spinach pie, "Is he doing one of his comic bits, do you think? Will he juggle oranges next?”She wasn't listening."How happy he is to be wrong," Peter said. "It's his special provenance. He loves to return to it. Of course he knows how deeply he misconstrues. This is part of the joy of the thing. The whole point is to pretend not to know. As some people protect their inexperience or fear, this man protects his knowledge of the true situation. It's a way of spreading guilt. His innocence, other people's guilt. There's a proportional relation. This is the theme of his life, pretending not to know. Keeps him going, absolutely.”He was addressing himself to me. Charles gazed past the traffic as though none of this had anything to do with him or was at worst an extension of the discourse on mathematics."I look forward to their retirement. They want to live in California, you know. We'll see each other on American holidays. Charlie will drink Miller Lite and watch the Super Bowl. We'll have cranberry sauce on Thanksgiving. My dear mother will finally get her tour of movie stars' homes. All the stars she's ever heard of are long dead, of course, whether she knows it or not. While she was in the jungles, the marshes and the hill stations, all the neon lights went out, one by one.”They were feeling happy again. Peter took a sip of his mother's wine, then directed another look my way, a different one, quizzical, mock angry."Who are you anyway," he said, "that I should tell you our secrets?”While we laughed I wondered if I would ever see these two people in quite the same way. Peter had altered them not only by what he'd said but by a simple physical extension of the local figure they made. He was the apex, the revelation of full effect. He knew his mother's affairs, his father's weaknesses, and I felt in a sense he'd stolen these things from me. I wanted to forget him, the jut of his face, its curious outdatedness, the voice with its self-referring note of complaint. I was afraid my romance with Ann Maitland would end, my word-romance, the pleasant distant speculative longing.Ann and Peter decided to go for a walk. We watched them cross to the small park, where they waited for a break in traffic."There they go," Charles said. "The twenty-four hours of my life. A.M. and P.M.”"Has he ever told you what he's doing?”"In mathematics? Something awesome, I gather. He expects to be burnt out by the time he's twenty-five. We'll see how he adapts to that.”There was an antique air of celibacy about Peter. It had the stubborn force of some vow a boy might make when he is fourteen, high-minded, his life suddenly come to a powerful hesitancy -a pledge which the man in his scrupulous carved space might well decide to honor. I had one of my sentimental thoughts. He would meet a woman one day soon and be immediately transformed. The apparatus of complaint would fall away. His cleverness would be shamed by the power of love.

My secretary, Mrs. Helen, had glazed yellow hair and the overpolite manner of someone who wishes the atmosphere was a little less casual. A delicate scent of dusting powder hung about her comings and goings. She liked to fuss over tea and Greek verbs, which she was helping me with, and had a fondness for anything British, near British or aspiring to British.She thought Owen Brademas was one of these. He'd been in the office earlier looking for me and although she'd invited him to wait he said he had some things to do and would return.I read the telexes and made check marks in the appropriate boxes on several option memos. Mrs. Helen described her infant grandson's tiny hands. She called me Mr. Oxtone.She was versed in the total range of social codes and usages. She advised me on the correct replies in Greek to everyday greetings or to inquiries about my health and she suggested phrases I might utter to someone celebrating his name day, someone else who was ill. On food and drink she was firm, insisting there was a proper order in which I might consume the coffee, the water and the crystal of rich preserves I was likely to be offered in someone's home. There was even a correct place to set the spoon once I'd finished using it.She practiced a demon neatness around the office. She was twice divorced, once widowed, and referred to these separate events with roughly equal good humor.When Owen showed up I saw why she thought he might be British or might at least aspire to that station. He wore a wide-brimmed velour hat, a wool scarf looped twice around the neck and trailed over one shoulder, a belted corduroy jacket, worn shiny, with elbow patches and leather buttons. He resembled, if not a Briton per se, then a British actor working down to the level of his character, a jaded expatriate in a nameless country."Just the man I want to see.”"Couldn't pass through town without saying hello, James.”"I need to have a theory confirmed.”We went to an ouzerí nearby, an old crowded smoky room with a high ceiling and posters on the columns and walls advertising English tea biscuits and Scotch whiskey. We drank and talked for three hours."Where have you been?”"I stayed on the island for a time. Then I traveled in the Peloponnese. Took buses, walked, caught colds.”"Where exactly?”"The southern Peloponnese. The middle tit.”"The Mani.”"Do you know it?”"Only by reputation," I said. "What are you doing in Athens?”"I want to take another look at the epigraphic collection in the National Museum. A place that interests me. It's a library of stones in effect. A huge room with shelves down both long walls, shelves down the middle, four levels high.”"Shelves full of stones.”"Many hundreds of stones, numbered. Parts of columns, walls, tablets, memorial reliefs. All inscribed, of course. A few letters in some cases are all that remain. Others with words, longer fragments. The Greeks made an art of the alphabet. They gave their letters a symmetry and a sense that something final had been made out of the stick figures of various early forms. Modern. The stones come in many sizes and shapes. No one is ever there. The caretaker follows me at a tactful distance. There is a table and a lamp. You take a stone from the shelf, put it on the table, then sit down and read what is inscribed, study the shapes.”He smiled, tipping his chair back against a column. I felt this was the picture he wanted to leave with me. A man in a room full of stones, reading."I went to Jerusalem with Volterra," I said."Jerusalem.”"Did you know that?”"No, I didn't.”"I came back with some questions for you.”"Fine," he said. "Do my best.”"They don't concern the trip. They concern what I think I learned there, what I heard.”"This is the theory you want me to confirm.”"That's right.”"Fine," he said."First the old man on the island.”"The murder.”"The mentally deficient old man. His body wasn't found in the village where he lived. It was found in another village on another part of the island.”"This is correct.”"Do you happen to know the old man's name? I don't.”"He was called Michaeli. I kept hearing the name all that week.”"What was his last name?”We were looking at each other. His face showed a melancholy easement, a deliverance almost. The noise of conversation grew around us."His full name was Michaelis Kalliambetsos.”"We both know the name of the village," I said. "Mikro Kamini.”"This is correct.”"What does all this mean?”"I wouldn't look for meaning, James.”"They found a man whose initials matched the first letter of each word in a particular place-name. They either led him to this place or waited for him to wander there on his own. Then they killed him.”"Yes. This seems to be what happened.”"Why?”"The letters matched.”"That's no answer.”"I wouldn't look for answers," he said."What would you look for, Owen? You said once you were trying to understand how their minds work. Pattern, order, some sort of unifying light. Is this what we're supposed to come away with?”He stared up at the unused loft, still tipped in his chair, holding the whiskey glass against his chest."What about the other island?" I said. "And there was the woman in the Wadi Rum.”"I don't know the details of these crimes. Hammers. This is all I know.”"There was a murder in a Christian village in Syria. Some men lived in caves nearby. One of them tried to speak Aramaic. The initials of the victim were cut into the knife they used to slash him to death. Do you know anything about this?”"I don't know the victim's name but I think I can tell you that his first and last names began with the same letter, and it was an M.”"How do you know this?”"The village is called Malula. It lies below vast protrusions of bedrock. I was there thirty years ago. There are inscriptions in the caves.”"You've been keeping up to date. Been talking to them, haven't you? What else do you know?”"James, why attack me? Don't you know helplessness when you see it? Look at the man who's long since given up on himself. The man who hands himself over to the nearest mob. For what, I'm not certain.”"Someone has to show an anger.”"Consider that you've done the job. What else do I know aboutt the cult? Basically what you know.”"Do we assume these initials on the knife were in Aramaic?The cult seems to be intent on using the local language. I gather no one writes Aramaic these days.”"I'm sure they used whatever older script they knew about or were able to find. The Aramaic M of eight hundred b.c. was a jagged letter, a forked lightning bolt, say. By the fourth century it had resolved itself into a graceful curve, bringing to mind the Arabic form, although this was still a long way off. Whatever version they engraved on the weapon, it was an M or double M. “"Why did they use a knife, not a hammer?”"A different unit or group. Possibly the weapon is irrelevant. They use what they can find. I don't know.”"No one has ever mentioned victims' initials on the hammers that were found.”"A different group, different practices.”A silence. I kept waiting for him to say something about my discovery. I'd been elated, after all, when the notion came to me in that Roman theater of some alphabetic link between the victim's name and the place where he or she was killed. A terrible elation. A knowledge bounded by emptiness and fear. What did I expect, congratulations?I told Owen about Vosdanik, his references to holy men, myth and history; to the ancient custom of scratching an enemy's name on a piece of pottery, then smashing it; to the excavation where he'd first heard of the cult; to religious visions and the language Jesus spoke."Nothing applies," Owen said.He knew about the vast excavation near the Sea of Galilee. It was at Megiddo, he said, which is thought to have been the biblical Armageddon. Allusive, suggestive. (I am alpha and omega.) Almost everything Vosdanik had said, almost any referential clue you might follow to the cult's origin or purpose would seem to signify something, to have a sense, a content. Owen dismissed it all. They weren't repeating ancient customs, they weren't influenced by the symbolism of holy books or barren places, they weren't making a plea to Egyptian or Minoan gods, or a sacrifice, or a gesture to prevent catastrophe.But they weren't the products of their own reveries either, the mass murderers we've come to know so well, the mass communicators, working outward from some private screen, conscious of an audience they might agreeably excite."We thought we knew this setting. The mass killer in his furnished room, in his century, feeding Gaines-burgers to a German shepherd. The news is full of settings, isn't it, James? You said it yourself one night. Men firing from highway overpasses, attic rooms. Unconnected to the earth. By which I think you meant nonpolitical in the broad sense. Murders that drift away from us. What waste.”We know those gaunt families whose night scoutings remind us so much of our childhood games. We know the stocking strangler, the gunman with sleepy eyes, the killer of women, the killer of vagrant old men, the killer of blacks, the sniper, the slasher in tight leather, the rooftop sodomist who hurls children into the narrow alley below. These things are in the literature, along with the screams of victims in some cases, which their murderers have thought instructive to put on tape.Here, he said, we have a set of crimes that take us beyond all this. There is a different signature here, a deeper and austere calculation. The murders are so striking in design that we tend to overlook the physical act itself, the repeated pounding and gouging of a claw hammer, the blood mess washing out. We barely consider the victims except as elements in the pattern.There is nothing in the literature, there is nothing in the folklore. And what a remarkable use for their humane impulses these cultists have found. Dispatching the feeble-minded outcast, the soon-to-die-anyway. Or is their choice of victims meant to be a statement that these acts are committed outside the accepted social structure, outside the easeful routines we ourselves inhabit, and should be paid scant mind. What has been lost? Think of it as an experiment in what the solitary mind does with its honed devices.But this isn't human nature as we might study it in some prowling boy found living alone in the jungle. The cult is made up of people who were educated at some point in their lives. They read, they converse with each other. They're not totally cut off, are they?So we talked, so we argued, taking roles, discarding them, the social theorist, the interrogator, the criminologist.He reset his chair squarely on the floor as though to demonstrate something (I'm imagining this), demonstrate what it was we were trying to do in all this talk, set a premise for the act, put it at some fixed level with regard to the earth. But the next thing he said came out of nowhere or out of the waveforms of another occasion. Past moments had a way of surfacing in his face, in delayed recognitions, and he simply entered the spoken thought."I've always believed I could see things other people couldn't. Elements falling into place. A design. A shape in the chaos of things. I suppose I find these moments precious and reassuring because they take place outside me, outside the silent grid, because they suggest an outer state that works somewhat the way my mind does but without the relentlessness, the predeterminative quality. I feel I'm safe from myself as long as there's an accidental pattern to observe in the physical world.”I asked him whether he had been feeling this need for a very long time, the need to be safe from himself. The question surprised him. He seemed to believe everyone felt it, all the time. When he was a boy, he said, the safe place was church, by a river, among cottonwoods, in the shade of the long afternoons. The choir loft extended across the back wall, the pews were narrow and hard. The minister gestured, sang and orated in the open promotional manner of a civic leader, sweat-stained and pink, a large man with white hair, booming by the river. Light fell across the pews with the mysterious softness of some remembered blessing, some serious happy glimpse of another world. It was a memory of light, a memory you could see in the present moment, feel in the warmth on your hands, it was light too dense to be an immediate account of things, it carried history in it, it was light filtered through dusty time. Christ Jesus was the double-edged name, half militant, half loving, that made people feel so good. The minister's wife talked to him often, a narrow woman with freckled hands.When things went bad and they moved to the tallgrass prairie, his parents joined a pentecostal church. There was nothing safe about this church. It was old, plain, set in the middle of nowhere, it leaked in wet weather, let in everything but light. A congregation of poor people and most of them spoke in tongues. This was an awesome thing to see and hear. His father fell away to some distant place, his mother clapped and wept. People's voices variously hummed and racketed, a hobbling chant, a search for melody and breath, bodies rising, attempts to heal a brokenness. Closed eyes, nodding heads. Standers and kneelers. The inside-outness of this sound, the tumbling out of found words, the arms raised, the tremble. What a strangeness to the boy in his lonely wanting, his need for safety and twice-seen light."Did you speak also?" I said.His eyes in their familiar startledness, their soft awe, grew attentive now, as though he'd stopped to analyze what he was feeling and what it meant. No, he hadn't spoken. He'd never spoken. He didn't know the experience. Not that it was an experience confined to some narrow category, the rural poor, the dispossessed. Many kinds of people knew the experience. Dallas executives spoke in tongues in gospel meetings in the shimmering tinfoil Hyatt. Catholics knew the experience, and middle-class blacks of the charismatic renewal, and fellowships of Christian dentists. Imagine their surprise, these tax-paying people, he said, these veterans of patio barbecues, when they learned they were carriers of ecstasy.But there was no reason it had to be carried out in a religious context. It was a neutral experience. You learn it, he said, or fail to learn it. It is learned behavior, fabricated speech, meaningless speech. It is a life focus for depressed people, according to the clinical psychologists.He measured what he was saying like a man determined to be objective, someone utterly convinced of the soundness of a proposition but wondering in a distant way (or trying to remember). whether anything has been left out."What is left, Owen?”"Ah. I ask myself.”"Where are you staying?”"Colleagues have given me a room at the American School. Do you know it?”"I live up the street.”"Then we'll see each other again. Good. I'll be here a week. Then I leave for Bombay, by freighter.”"So India is next.”"India.”"You told us once.”"India.”"Sanskrit.”"Sanskrit, Pali, Tamil, Oriya, Bengali, Telugu. It's crazy, James. Rock edicts in ancient languages. I'll see what I can before the money runs out or the rains come. When do the rains come?”"Another thing you told us, on one of those island nights. They're on the mainland. They're in the Peloponnese.”"A supposition.”"On some level you want other people involved in this, don't you? I'm not sure you're even conscious of it but you don't want to be alone in this. With Kathryn there was no chance-she was firm about keeping a distance. In my case there was only a token interest, conversation for its own sake. But with Volterra you found a willing listener, a willing participant in a sense. He showed no reluctance, no scruples about what they did. This is a man whose interest in things can be almost deadly. He wanted to know more, he wanted to find them. So you pointed him in a certain direction. I'm not sure it was the best or simplest direction. I suspect you wanted to keep the local group to yourself. You didn't exactly mislead Frank. You told him the truth, the partial truth. You sent him after a second or third group, whatever the correct number. What is the correct number?”"Most likely three. No more than four.”"One is in Greece.”"You're supposing," he said."One is in Jordan. One was in Syria-I don't know how long ago. Vosdanik mentioned Syria, he mentioned Jordan, he also told us about a cult murder in northern Iran. But it wasn't clear how many groups he was talking about.”"Forget it," Owen said."That's what I told Frank. Forget it.”They are engaged in a painstaking denial. We can see them as people intent on ritualizing a denial of our elemental nature. To eat, to expel waste, to sense things, to survive. To do what is necessary, to satisfy what is animal in us, to be organic, meat-eating, all blood-sense and digestion.Why would a denial of these things have to end in murder?We know we will die. This is our saving grace in a sense. No animal knows this but us. It is one of the things that sets us apart. It is our special sadness, this knowledge, and therefore a richness, a sanctification. The final denial of our base reality, in this schematic, is to produce a death. Here is the stark drama of our separateness. A needless death. A death by system, by machine-intellect.So we talked, so we argued, the anthropologist, the storyteller, the mad logician. Strange that when we saw each other again it would not be that week, in Athens, with only half a city block between us. Maybe all the talking had brought us closer to an understanding, a complicity, than we wanted to be.

In the light of a lowering sky the city is immediate and sculptured. None of summer's white palls, its failures of distance and perspective. There are shadow-angles, highlighted surfaces, areas of grayish arcs and washes. Laundry blows on rooftops and balconies. Against an urgent sky, with dull thunder pounding over the gulf, this washwork streaming in the wind can be an emblematic and touching thing. Always the laundry, always the lone old woman in black who keeps to a corner of the elevator, the bent woman in endless mourning. She disturbs the composure of the modern building with its intercom and carpeted lobby, its marble veneer.Some nights the wind never stops, beginning in a clean shrill pitch that broadens and deepens to a careless and suspenseful force, rattling shutters, knocking things off the balconies, creating a pause in one's mind, a waiting-for-the-full-force-to-hit. Inside the apartment, closet doors swing open, creak shut. The next day it's there again, a clatter in the alleys.A single cloud, low-lying, serpentine, clings to the long ridge of Hymettus. The mountain seems to collect weather, to give it a structure, an aspect beyond the physical, weather's menace, say, or the inner light of things. The sun and moon rise behind the mountain and in the last moments of certain days a lovely dying appears in the heights, a delivering into violet, burnt rose. The cloud is there now, a shaped thing, dense and white, concealing the radar that faces east.Girls wear toggle coats. In heavy rain there is flooding, people die. A certain kind of old man is seen in a black beret, hands folded behind him as he walks.Charles Maitland paid a visit, making a number of sound effects as he got out of his rubberized slicker. He walked to an armchair and sat down."Time for my midnight cup of cocoa.”It was seven o'clock and he wanted a beer."Where are your rugs?" he said."I don't have any.”"Everyone in the area has rugs. We all have rugs. It's what we do, James. Buy rugs.”"I'm not interested in rugs. I'm not a rug person, as the Bordens would say.”"I was over there yesterday. They have some Turkomans and Baluchis, fresh from customs. Very nice indeed.”"Means nothing to me.”"Weaving districts are becoming inaccessible. Whole countries in fact. It's almost too late to go to the source. It is too late in many cases. They seem to go together, carpet-weaving and political instability.”We thought about this."Or martial law and pregnant women," I said."Yes," he said slowly, looking at me. "Or gooey desserts and queues for petrol.”"Plastic sandals and public beheadings.”"Pious concern for the future of the Bedouins. What does that go with?”He sat forward now, turning the pages of a magazine on the coffee table. A sound of rain on the terrace rail."Who is it, do you think?" I said. "Is it the Greek? Eliades?”He looked at me sharply."Just a guess," I said. "I noticed them at dinner that night.”"You noticed nothing. She would never give anyone cause to notice. Whatever she's doing, I promise you it's not being noticed.”"I know I shouldn't be bringing it up. I've no right. But it's been hanging in the air. Even your son makes reference. I don't want us to have to adopt a cryptic language or a way of avoiding each other's eyes.”"What Greek?" he said."Eliades. The night David and Lindsay took their famous swim. Intense man, black beard.”"Who was he with?”"The German. There was a German. He was there to meet someone who never showed up. Someone David knows. Refrigeration systems.”"You saw nothing. I could never believe she gave anyone cause to notice.”"It's not what I saw. It's what I heard. She spoke to him in Greek.”I waited for him to tell me how stupid it was to believe this meant something. I felt stupid, saying it. But the sound of her voice, the way it fell, the way it became a sharing, a trust, drawing them away from the rest of us, the way it shaded toward a murmur-the moment haunted me, I think.Charles didn't tell me I was stupid. He sat quietly turning the pages, possibly thinking back to that night, trying to recollect. There were so many dinners, friends, transients, so many names and accents. I could see him try to construct a summer night around that single image, Lindsay standing on the beach, in half light, laughing. He couldn't connect it. One more sadness at the middle of things."I went clean off the rails in Port Harcourt. She left me, you know.”"I know.”"There was no one else. Just left.”"She was lonely. What do you expect?”"The Greek," he said, like a name mislaid. "Was it in Tunis I met him? Did we see each other later at the airport, come back to Athens together? I took him home for a drink. We all sat around and talked. An acceptable scenario, wouldn't you say? I didn't see him again until the night you describe.”We went to a movie together, went to dinner, saw a man so fat he had to move sideways down a flight of steps. The wind kept me up that night until two or three, a steady noise, a rustling in the walls.When I walked into the lobby the next evening Niko was at the desk with his coffee cup and newspaper. His small daughter was in his lap and he had to keep shifting her to read the paper.Cold.Cold, I said.Rain.Small rain.I talked to the girl briefly, waiting for the elevator to descend. I said she had two shoes. One, two. I said her eyes were brown, her hair was brown. She knocked the empty coffee cup into the saucer. The concierge's wife came out, a broad woman in house slippers.Cold.Cold.Very cold.Later my father called."What time is it there?" he said.We talked about the time, the weather. He'd received a letter from Tap and a card from Kathryn. Printed at the bottom of the card, he said, was the following sentence: No trees were destroyed to make this card. This annoyed him. Typical Kathryn, he said. Most of his anger came from TV. All that violence, crime, political cowardice, government deception, all that appeasement, that official faintheartedness. It rankled, it curled him into a furious ball, a fetus of pure rage. The six o'clock news, the seven o'clock news, the eleven o'clock news. He sat there collecting it, doubled up with his tapioca pudding. The TV set was a rage-making machine, working at him all the time, giving him direction and scope, enlarging him in a sense, filling him with a world rage, a great stalking soreness and rancor."Do they have exact-change lanes?" he shouted out to me. "What about goat cheese, Murph wants to know. In case we might visit, which I seriously doubt.”When the violet light seeps into Hymettus, when the sky suddenly fills with birds, tall wavering spiral columns, I sometimes want to turn away. These birdforms mingle, flash, soar, change color light to dark, revolve and shimmer, silk scarves turning in the wind. Bands of light pour out of cloud massifs. The mountain is a glowing coal. How is it the city keeps on functioning, buses plowing through the dusk, while these forces converge in the air, natural radiances and laws, this coded flight of birds, a winter's day? (Kathryn would know what kind of birds they are.) Sometimes I think I'm the only one who sees it. Sometimes, too, I go back to whatever I was doing, to my magazine, my English-Greek vocabulary. I come in off the terrace and sit with my back to the sliding door.You don't allow yourself the full pleasure of things.A white-armed traffic cop stands in the dark, gesturing, beckoning to the gathered shapes. I hear the cadenced wail of an ambulance stuck in traffic. How hard it is to find the lyrical mode we've devised to accompany our cities to their nostalgic doom. An evolution of seeing. The sensibility that enables us to see a ruined beauty in these places can't easily be adapted to Athens, where the surface of things is mostly new, where the ruin is differently managed, the demise indistinguishable from the literal building-up and building-out. What happens when a city can't fade longingly toward its end, can't be abandoned piece by piece to its damaged truth, its layered ages of brick and iron? When it contains only the tension and paralysis of the superficial new? Paralysis. This is what the city teaches us to fear.The ambulance stands fast, wailing in the night. The kiosks are lighted now.