by Paula Fox
“Would you say my neck is long or short, Mom?” Lily asked.
“It’s sort of retractable, like a turtle’s,” said Paul, grinning.
“For someone with an acorn for a nose—” Lily began, then stopped. Paul was looking beyond her shoulder, his expression surprised, then joyful. He stood up and waved. The other Coreys turned to see what he had seen.
“Who’s that?” Mr. Corey asked.
“Jack,” Paul said somewhat breathlessly. “Mom, he’s the American I told you about. He lives in Panagia.”
Jack was standing past the last row of tables, his hands in his pockets. He stared at Paul expressionlessly, then gave a curt nod. A dark-haired man had also halted several yards away from Jack and was looking at the Coreys. Paul looked confused as though he didn’t know what to do, sit down again or remain standing.
“Maybe they’ll have coffee with us, fellow-Americans and all that,” said Mr. Corey. He got up and walked toward Jack, Paul following him. Lily noticed that the dark-haired man didn’t come forward but stood absolutely still, poised as though on his toes for a leap.
“Where did you meet him?” asked Mrs. Corey.
“Up by the acropolis,” Lily answered, keeping her eyes on her plate. It was odd that when you had something to hide, you were at once sure that someone was looking for it.
Mr. Corey and Paul returned with Jack and his father, and the woman who had served them their desserts brought two more small folding chairs. Jack sat down—reluctantly, it seemed to Lily—next to Paul; his father sat next to Mr. Corey, who asked them what they’d like.
“We won’t have anything,” the man said in a deep, harsh voice. “We eat much later. I’m Jimmy Hemmings. I gather you know Jack here. Everyone on the island knows us. Strange to meet up with Americans. We thought we were the only ones, didn’t we, Jack?”
Jack looked up at the sky wordlessly.
Mr. Hemmings wore a black leather jacket and a black T-shirt. He looked much younger than Mr. Corey. His eyes were a brilliant, piercing blue, and his lashes were as black as his hair.
Mr. Corey explained how and why they’d come to Thasos. Mr. Hemmings nodded rapidly and muttered uh-huh constantly, as though hurrying Mr. Corey on with his story.
“A teacher. Well. I’ve been a teacher too,” he said when Mr. Corey stopped talking. “I’ve taught languages for one thing. I speak several languages, including Magyar—”
“—You mean Hungarian?” Mr. Corey interjected.
“If you prefer,” replied Mr. Hemmings somewhat loftily. “We’re here mainly for Jack. I wanted him to see a thing or two before he gets too old to appreciate a foreign country—before prison walls close around the growing boy—and so forth. Also, I’ve been doing a bit of prospecting up in the mountains. There’s more than marble on this island. There’re precious metals and ores. I guess we’ve been here about eight months, wouldn’t you say, Jack?”
Again the boy said nothing. Mr. Hemmings frowned for a moment, then went on.
“We had to take care of our residency requirements, of course, so we went to Istanbul last month.”
“We went just across the Yugoslav border to take care of ours,” Mr. Corey said.
“You should have spent some time there; you should have gone to Skopje, at least, not to mention the Adriatic coast. Terrible bureaucracy here,” Mr. Hemmings continued. “Have you ever tried to have anything sent through the mail? A chap in Berlin sent me some pipe tobacco, and the postal taxes were just too expensive. It was a matter of principle with me not to pay them, so I left the tobacco in the post office. Let them smoke it—I wish them joy of it. So you children have met before? And where was that?”
The two boys were mute. “Up near the acropolis,” said Lily in a low voice.
“Ah, well, Jack goes everywhere. He’s damned marvelous! He takes care of himself—the best thing, of course. Jack’s been an independent fellow since he was four, haven’t you?” He stared intently at his son.
“I guess so,” muttered Jack.
Mr. Hemmings stood. “We’d best push on. Drop by and see us in Panagia,” he said. Lily didn’t listen to what her father said in reply. She was watching Paul and Jack. Paul was whispering something in his ear, and Jack nodded several times and whispered back. Mrs. Corey said, “Goodbye,” in a loud voice, the only word she’d spoken since the Hemmingses had sat down.
The Coreys watched them thread their way around tables and disappear among the people on the quay.
“I’m trying to remember what he said,” Mrs. Corey remarked in a puzzled voice. “‘Drop by’—what on earth does he mean? I’ve known people like that man. They tell you everything, you think, then when they’ve gone, you realize they’ve told you nothing.”
“He lets Jack go anywhere—by himself,” Paul said.
Mrs. Corey looked at him reflectively as though he had asked a question. All she said was, “Perhaps Jack doesn’t have much choice.”
There was a great deal of noise around them, most of it pleasant, animated talking and children laughing, the clatter of cutlery and plates, the soft wash of waves against the quay. But Lily felt a kind of waiting silence at their table. She recalled other such moments when, it seemed to her, each person in her family had drawn away to a secret place. Once it had happened when she and Paul had been shouting and fighting in the back seat of the car, for hours, she guessed, during a summer trip to Maine. Mr. Corey had pulled over to the side of the road. Neither of her parents had turned around. She and Paul had gradually quieted, and they sat there for some time, no one speaking. Another time, her mother had stood up abruptly from the dinner table and gone to the kitchen, from which Lily had heard the sound of a glass breaking. It was right after Granny Corey, who was visiting, had complained that the children’s clothes really needed ironing—they looked like laundry sacks, she’d said. After her mother returned, they’d finished supper as though their lives depended on not making a single sound.
This time it must have been something about Mr. Hemmings and Jack that had made everything feel strange, unfamiliar.
But the feeling passed as they strolled along the waterfront toward the small hotel where they had first stayed, where Lily had seen the shepherd leaning on his crook, standing in the middle of his flock of sheep. On their way back Lily ran to a small tourist shop in whose cluttered window a tiny alabaster goat stood on an embroidered wool bag. Every week she asked the price of it, and Mr. Panakos, the owner, would exclaim, “Ah me! It costs the same as it always does,” as though the price had nothing to do with him.
Not far from the shop was Giorgi’s taverna. As they neared it, Lily heard applause and loud shouts and the music of the bouzouki. Standing at the entrance, looking in, were Mr. Kalligas and Costa, the museum keeper. The Coreys went to speak with them. The two men greeted them all warmly, but their attention returned at once to what was happening inside the taverna.
Tables had been moved back to make a space. In the center of it Mr. Hemmings was dancing, his head thrown back, his eyes closed, his arms raised high like the wings of an angel in flight. Dimitrious, the barber, was sitting in a shadowed corner playing, his head bent over the bouzouki, his hands moving nearly too fast to see.
He had cut Paul’s and Mr. Corey’s hair several times. Lily had gone along with them to the little triangular shop near the ferry harbor. He often had to put his scissors down and go on a savage fly-killing expedition around the walls. He was a very handsome young man. But when he laughed, you could see he had no teeth left. Mr. Kalligas had explained to Lily that Dimitrious had gone to Kavalla and had all his teeth pulled out because he couldn’t afford all the dental work he needed, and he couldn’t afford false teeth either. Now and then a tourist would promise to buy him a fine set of teeth if he would go to Berlin or Paris, or some other place with them, and sing in a nightclub. Dimitrious was always willing but, Mr. Kalligas reported, the tourists would forget about him and go back to their ships, leaving him and his bouzouki on the
wharf.
The music grew louder and seemed about to explode the instrument itself. Jim Hemmings whirled, knelt, kicked out his long legs, sprang up like a great cat, clapped his hands, and snapped his fingers; and though Lily had been troubled back at the pastry shop when the man spoke to her father and ignored her and her mother, she couldn’t help but admire him now. The Greeks watching followed his every movement and gesture, their eyes gleaming. She glimpsed Jack Hemmings standing near the barber, his eyes open wide, looking at his father with adoration. Then, gradually, the dance began to grow slow, and the music softened. Mr. Kalligas touched both children on their shoulders, beckoning to them to follow him outside.
Lily especially liked that about Mr. Kalligas, the way he often would take her and Paul aside and speak to them seriously.
“A great, great dancer,” he said to them. “Rather an awful chap! Cold as ice! But we all follow him into the sea if he dance like that. What a devil of a dancer! I heard new people coming along here. Did you know that? A Danish man and his family. He comes to draw the Temple of Halyke. You know about that—”
Costa interrupted him with shouted words too fast for Lily to understand. They both grabbed Paul, gripped him with their hands, and lifted him straight up in the air, shaking him like a giant rattle. Costa swiped at his ankle. Lily saw, with horror, an enormous black millipede drop to the ground and scuttle away into the dark. Paul seemed frozen as they set him back on his feet. “What!” he exclaimed, then shuddered. “What was that?”
Mr. and Mrs. Corey appeared at Paul’s side, bending over him solicitously.
“He’s all right,” Mr. Kalligas said. “I save him. You got to look out for those things. The bite is badder than the snake.” Costa, who was gentle and hardly ever spoke about himself, patted Paul on the back and whispered, “Good, good …”
“Did you see it?” Lily asked as they walked home.
“Don’t talk about it,” Paul said firmly. “I felt it. That was enough.”
The music of the bouzouki faded away.
“I think that’s enough wildlife for you today,” Mr. Corey said to Paul. “Sea nettles, millipedes—what next?”
It was dark along their path except where moonlight scattered silver coins among the pebbles. Lily shivered. She wasn’t thinking of the millipede but of Jack. Just as they had left Giorgi’s, she had seen him standing outside the circle of men congratulating his father. His eyebrows had been drawn together, and she had noticed his fists, clenched tightly at his sides.
SIX
“Children, time to get eggs and bread, but, please, no more wildlife,” Mrs. Corey called from the kitchen where she and Mr. Corey were drinking their morning coffee.
“You can choose,” Lily offered Paul. She was standing in his doorway. He didn’t look up. “You get the millipede,” she said. He rested his chin on one knee as he tied his shoelaces so tightly his sneakers puckered.
“The laces will break,” she said. He shrugged.
“Well, I’ll get the eggs then.” She lingered a moment, then went off. In the great open space of Poseidon’s temple a woman who was hanging up sheets waved and called a greeting to her. By the time she returned home, four brown eggs in her hands, she felt more cheerful.
Paul left the house immediately after they’d finished breakfast. Mr. Corey shouted after him, “Paul! Come back and make your bed!”
He raced back into the house, his jaw clenched. Lily watched him throw the blanket over his rumpled sheets.
“Where are you going?” she asked a little timidly.
“I have things to do,” he muttered and ran down the hall and out the gate.
Lily tried to read. After she’d read the same few sentences a dozen times and not gotten them into her head, she wandered into her parents’ bedroom. Mr. Corey was very carefully sharpening a short pencil with a kitchen paring knife. She had hoped they could talk together a couple of minutes before he started work, although she didn’t have anything much in mind. Mrs. Corey suddenly ran into the room.
“Gil, you pinched my knife! How could you! You have no respect for the grand meals that knife helps me turn out.”
“I apologize,” Mr. Corey said, grinning and handing over the knife. “I’m simply trying to find things to do so I won’t have to write.”
“I can help you with that,” said her mother. “You can begin with the laundry. First you heat the water.”
Neither of them was paying her the least attention. She went back to her room. She wished the goats would run through it again. She was tired of the Persians and the Greeks and their endless warfare. She stared out the window at the mulberry tree. Was that the tortoise lying among its thick roots? Should she go and see? Well, she thought, she’d better get used to mornings without Paul. She was nearly positive he had gone off to meet Jack somewhere. She had hoped they wouldn’t meet him again, but they had. That was that. She decided to go to the museum. Maybe Christos or Nichos would be there. Though they were much younger than she and very shy, they were friendly and would talk with her.
The museum stood in a corner of the agora. As she went toward it, Costa called out to her from across a field where broken columns lay partly hidden by tall grass and dog roses. He was holding up a scythe, from the blade of which dangled a snake like a thick brown vine.
He had caught it for her, he said. Everyone in the village knew how scared she was of vipers. Mr. Kalligas, trying not to smile, had told her there was an old man who lived up on the mountain who would cure her if she was bitten. He had a forked stick that he placed so, Kalligas had said, jabbing her arm with two of his fingers, and the poison would be gone at once.
She waved to Costa and told him she was on her way to visit his museum. She walked up the path, past the bird and the huge statue of the youth, and into the cool interior. There were only a few rooms, but they were filled to their ceilings with statues and columns and ancient pots and friezes and tablets. Very little was kept behind glass. She could pick up the shard of an ancient jar and hold it in her hand until it grew warm. She could rest her palm lightly on the heads and shoulders of sculptures of gods that had been made thousands of years ago when people still believed in them.
Artemis and her twin brother, Apollo, were her favorites among the gods. Apollo was the god of light, she had read. He could be menacing, too, as he looked to be in a small statue of him she had discovered behind a broken stone shield. It seemed all of the gods had contrary natures. They were both marvelous and terrible, like Artemis, who protected young creatures but was also Hecate, goddess of the dark and of the crossways where three roads met, places of evil magic. She was the moon goddess, too.
Lily stood on the tiled floor of the museum, holding a fragment of a small marble bird, recalling a night during their second week on Thasos when she and Paul had waked up at the same hour and met on the balcony. The Aegean had been like a great pale flame stretching to the coast of Macedonia, a black line across the water, and the sky had been filled with a milky light as though there had been a silent explosion of stars. They had never seen moonlight such as that.
As she was leaving the museum, she met Costa holding Nichos by his hand. Costa’s skin was faintly pocked. His deep-set brown eyes expressed gentleness and patience. He was not sharp and funny and fast like Mr. Kalligas, but Lily liked him as much as she liked the older man. Costa often helped her father look up words in Mr. Corey’s Greek-English pocket dictionary; he seemed charmed by the small green-leather book, holding it carefully in his hands as he looked through its pages. He had learned a few English words from it. He tried out a phrase now.
“How ere you?” he asked.
Nichos giggled and covered his mouth with his hand.
“I am well,” Lily replied in English.
Costa grinned and hurried back into Greek. “Good,” he said. “Nichos has come to help me with the antiquities. We must move some of those old warriors out of the garden and into the museum.” The garden served as extra storage spa
ce. Through a window beyond the museum entrance hall Lily could see the old warriors. They were in so many pieces it seemed they must have been fighting for several thousand years.
Costa clasped Nichos to himself for a minute, telling Lily to stay as long as she wished, then led him off to the garden.
The Greeks seemed especially affectionate toward children and, Lily thought, amused by them. Strangers on the streets of Athens had often paused to speak to Lily and Paul, patting their faces and hair tenderly.
She walked down the lane, pausing to watch the baker lift up toward his large oven a wooden paddle upon which reposed eight loaves of unbaked bread. It would be, she guessed, the third batch of the morning.
But not everyone was at work in Limena. Through an opening to the quay between two houses she saw several children astride bicycles. Among them, riding like furies, were Jack and Paul, and trying to keep up with them, laughing and clapping his hands, ran Nichos’ little brother, Christos.
With a flourish Jack reversed his bicycle, jumped from it, and raised his hands like a champion prizefighter who has won a bout. Paul was grinning at him and applauding. Suddenly, Jack grabbed up Christos, roughly set him down on the handlebars, and raced off.
Lily sighed and made her way to the House of the Turk. She hadn’t looked in on it for some time. It had belonged to a Turkish official who had lived on Thasos until 1912, when a Greek admiral had freed the island from the Turks and returned it to Greek sovereignty. She and Paul had found the door unlocked and wandered through the empty rooms, on whose stone floors leaves had drifted and piled up. There was a garden in the back of the house with a grape arbor like a roof of leaves. It shut out the sun entirely, and it had been wonderfully cool beneath it.
