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