by Don DeLillo
“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, some where 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, swing ing 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 re-evaluation 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. “l 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 b
ounced 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.”
