by Paula Fox
Now the hills were much steeper, there was no sign of the great wall anymore, but still Lily could see small terraces far up their slopes where old olive trees grew. Nearly two hours after they’d left Limena, Odysseus brought the boat closer to the island. They were chugging toward a narrow, tapering peninsula. Scattered along it were huge sections of marble columns.
Mr. Haslev, shouting above the noise of the engine, told them some war party must have landed on the peninsula thousands of years earlier. The Greeks, who had quarried the marble from the hills, had fled, leaving their unfinished work behind them. Lily, looking straight up, her straw hat falling off, thought, it is the same sky they looked at. Everything else has changed but that.
They rounded the peninsula and came into a harbor where the water was as clear as glass, revealing large, flat, light-brown stones lying on the bottom, across which darted schools of tiny silver fish like filaments of wire. Odysseus turned off the engine, and they drifted toward shore. On the pebbled beach stood three whitewashed huts with blue-painted doors. They appeared deserted. But then, from a small stand of pine trees, an elderly couple emerged, hurrying past the houses toward the hill on the other side. The woman carried the same kind of wooden paddle Lily had seen the baker use, and in fact, there was a round loaf of bread on it. Odysseus said they were shepherds. “They run away from people—they only like their animals,” he said. In October, he told them, there would be a few more people, who would come to harvest the olives growing high above them on the hill.
The old couple disappeared as the bow of the boat ground over the pebbles onto the shore. A great sunny silence hung over them. Everyone sat unmoving for a moment. Then Odysseus stepped out onto land. Lily observed that the cut on his foot had closed up.
They all helped carry the supplies up the beach to a larger hut, farther back from the shore than the others, that they had not seen from the boat.
“But where is the temple?” Lily asked Mr. Haslev.
“We will soon see,” he answered. “But first the duty things.”
Mr. Corey, carrying a box of Swiss canned meat and tea and sugar, suddenly put down the box.
“Paul! Jack!” he shouted.
The two boys had gone to one of the huts, and Paul was watching Jack as he flung himself again and again at the blue door.
“What is the matter with that boy?” Lily heard her father say to her mother. Paul had turned to look at Mr. Corey, but Jack continued to strike the door with his hands and his shoulders. Then Odysseus shouted something of which Lily could make out only the word no, and Jack stopped. He stood for a moment looking at the door, then walked to where they were standing, his face sullen. Paul trailed behind.
“That house belongs to someone,” Mr. Corey said sternly.
“I just wanted to look inside,” Jack said, kicking pebbles, his shoulders hunched.
“You can look inside our house,” Mr. Haslev said, smiling. Jack didn’t respond, only continued to kick at the pebbles.
Everyone except Paul and Jack crowded into the hut. The walls were thick. Small windows let in light that fell on the hard-packed earthen floor. Odysseus set down a basket he had carried in and went outside to lean against a wall and smoke a cigarette. The hut was bone-clean except for mouse droppings trailing through the tiny cavelike rooms.
Mr. Haslev swept away the droppings. Directed by Hanne, they put away supplies. Christine had set her canvas chair in the center of the largest room and was sitting on it, dreamily watching people move around her. Lily took the lemonade and water bottles down to the water and propped them up with stones. The small waves lapped gently at her hands. When she looked up, she glimpsed Jack and Paul moving among the pine trees.
The Haslevs and the Coreys had emerged from the hut, Christine straddling her father’s shoulders. “Now we shall go and see the old, new temple,” Mr. Haslev said. “Actually,” he added, “it’s only a part of it—the portico.”
Thirty yards or so behind the hut stood a line of willow-like trees. As they approached them, Jack and Paul suddenly appeared in front of them.
“We saw it,” Jack said. “It’s little.” He looked at Paul as though for confirmation. “It’s very little,” he repeated and suddenly barked with laughter, as though, Lily thought, they were all fools to be there.
Mr. Haslev looked disconcerted for a moment. Then he said firmly, “It doesn’t matter at all how large or small it is.” Everyone moved on past the line of trees.
The portico stood before them in an open space, the ground covered with stones. Its slender columns were a pale apricot color, and through them Lily saw the blue sea.
“There’s nothing between us and Turkey,” observed Hanne.
“This is the most faraway place I’ve ever been,” said Mrs. Corey.
They spoke softly as though not to wake something, or someone, who might be sleeping inside the portico.
“There are graves nearby,” Mr. Haslev told them, almost in a whisper, “and cult shrines.” Christine lowered her head until it rested on her father’s.
Suddenly, Jack emitted a loud war whoop. Christine started and grabbed her father’s forehead, and Lily jumped a foot from where she’d been standing. Paul was laughing silently a few yards away. When Lily glared at him, he stared back at her stonily. Everyone appeared to be making an effort not to look at Jack, but Lily shot a glance at him. He was grinning uneasily, off by himself near the trees. As she turned her head, she glimpsed Paul walking quickly to stand beside him.
“Are there snakes here?” Lily asked her mother. She felt frightened all at once. The beautiful small temple seemed a fading dream. She stared at the ground.
“You know they’re pretty much everywhere,” Mrs. Corey replied. “You also know they don’t go after people. Why don’t you have a swim? I’ll walk to the beach with you. Pretty soon, we can have our picnic.”
By the time Lily had stripped to her bathing suit, she heard the boys shouting in the water. She saw Paul leap up and try to duck Jack. They gripped each other’s shoulders and sank out of sight for a few seconds, emerging smoothly and swiftly like two dolphins, to laugh and shake their heads, drops of water flying around them.
Lily sat on her towel, and her mother sat down next to her.
Lily sensed her mother’s gaze on her. She felt a strange kind of embarrassment. After a moment Mrs. Corey put an arm around her. “You may feel like a wallflower, Lily,” she said, “but you look like a beach flower to me.”
Lily leaned against her for a moment.
“What does Jack want to do that for—mess up everything?” she asked as she stared at the boys who were swimming now toward the peninsula, close beside each other, their brown shoulders shining, and sleek as seals.
“I can think of a reason or two. I don’t know they’d explain much,” Mrs. Corey replied. “You know, if we were at home and Paul met a boy like Jack, there would be other friends who would”—she hesitated—“who would interest him too. But here, there’s only Jack.”
“What about me?” Lily burst out. “Aren’t I enough?”
“And they’re different, Jack and his father,” Mrs. Corey went on, as though she hadn’t heard Lily, “and mysterious.” Then she began to pin up Lily’s braid, taking the hairpins from her Greek bag that was embroidered with yellow stars and green crosses. “Oh, Lily,” she mumbled, a pin in her mouth. “It isn’t that at all! You’re enough—you’re plenty!”
Lily didn’t think so.
Her mother said, “No person can be everything for another person.”
Lily got up, ran to the water, and plunged in. As she swam underwater for a few feet, she opened her eyes and saw, dimly, the round stones on the bottom. They looked like watery loaves of brown bread. She burst through the surface and faced down the small harbor, toward the sea, toward Turkey. For some time she was able to forget all about Jack.
SEVEN
Mr. Haslev’s drawings of the portico of Halyke were spread out on the long table he
had found, with Mr. Kalligas’ help, and which he had set up beneath the thick branches of the grape arbor in the garden. He had let Lily look at them as often as she wished since the family had returned to Limena, explaining to her each addition and change he made in the elevations.
He had improved the terrible water closet, reducing the size of the gaping hole and painting the walls white. The Haslevs had scavenged about in tiny hill villages, finding odd bits of furnishings the Greek owners were glad to sell to them.
Now they had plenty of chairs, two small tables, and even a small, intricately carved chest of drawers. They were beautiful, Hanne said. But the villagers didn’t want them anymore. They wanted new plastic furniture. It was all very well, she told Lily, for foreigners like themselves to admire the lovely old stuff, but for the people of Thasos that stuff meant being poor, not having all of the things they imagined the rest of the world had.
The two families often ate supper together. The Haslevs partly made up to Lily for Jack’s intrusion into the Coreys’ life.
Paul spent nearly every waking hour with Jack. Since his work at the cobbler’s was very casual, he was able, now and then, to go with Jack on the pleasure boat to Prinos.
Sometimes Jim Hemmings appeared at twilight in the square beneath the plane trees, his motorcycle slowing down, snorting like a halting bull, the noise breaking into the sweet murmur of early evening. Then he would ride Jack home to Panagia. But often as not Jack stayed with the Coreys, sleeping on an old mattress Stella loaned them. He spoke to Mr. and Mrs. Corey in monosyllables, always moving restlessly, making a struggle not to chew away at his fingernails, Lily saw. But at least he spoke.
On those nights he stayed Lily could hear the mumble of Paul’s and Jack’s voices late into the night. One time she crept from her room to Paul’s feeling ashamed and frightened lest they catch her there outside the door. She held her breath and listened. Inside the room they grew silent.
One morning Mr. Corey went with Lily to get the breakfast eggs. He told her a little about the book he was writing, about the thousands of children, led by Peter the Hermit on a crusade, who’d been abandoned in Marseille, lost, or sold into slavery. On their way back through the temple of Poseidon he suddenly said, “One of Jack’s troubles is—he doesn’t want to let his father know he isn’t marvelous, that he’s just a boy.”
A friendly goat was nuzzling Lily’s hand. It must be easier to be a goat than a human, Lily thought, except you could end up as somebody’s dinner.
That morning they were to go to Kavalla. Mr. Corey needed to visit the American library there to find a reference book. Paul had pleaded to stay. When his parents remained adamant, he had reproached them, saying they were always talking about discipline and doing your work. How come they were ready to take him away from it just to go to a library? When he had finished at the cobbler’s, he was pretty sure he could go and stay at Mr. Kalligas’ house until they came home. Paul had loved going to Kavalla last time. Now, Lily knew, he didn’t want to miss a day with Jack.
Paul was not Jack’s only follower. Manolis, Paul’s Greek friend, spent any time he could be spared by his father from the making of the terra-cotta jars, down on the quay with other children who had come to watch Jack ride a bicycle. Just as his father excelled at dancing, so Jack had become the champion rider.
At midday, usually, the children would begin to gather near Giorgi’s taverna. Jack would appear, swaggering, his pocket full of drachmas he had earned on the boat to Prinos. He could bring the bicycle’s front wheel up sharply, balancing on the rear wheel. He rode in intricate fast circles so close to the edge of the quay that he appeared to be hovering over the water. He would finish his performance by sailing down the embankment above the streets of the ancient city, his hands held high above his head. The boys who could pay for the bikes would try to copy his exploits, but caution held them back. The smaller boys would ask Jack to give them rides, especially little Christos, whose voice would rise in a wild cry of delight when Jack lifted him to the handlebars.
Lily grew bored with herself for always saying to Paul that Jack was not supposed to ride the children like that. He paid no attention to her anyhow. When she told him she had asked Mr. Kalligas about the village beneath the sea and he had said there was no such thing, Paul only shrugged. “It wasn’t a lie,” he said. “You hear all sorts of stories in a foreign country.”
He sulked all the way to Kavalla, staying on the narrow deck of the Maria and glaring at the water. From the wharf in Kavalla, where vendors sold everything from head scarves to plaster replicas of Venus de Milo, you could look up narrow cobbled streets to the acropolis and a Byzantine castle and beyond them to the great aqueduct striding across the hills. It had been built by Suleiman the Magnificent in the 16th century. Kavalla was bright and lively and full of people, and Paul began to look more cheerful, more like his old self.
After they went to the library, they ate in a big, airy restaurant where Lily had a large plate of buttery mashed potatoes, her favorite food. Mr. and Mrs. Corey had several errands to do. The children wandered back to the waterfront and walked around the old market, which was just up the hill above where the Maria was anchored. “For you, a very special price,” said an old peddler to Lily when she picked up a small brass pot. She pulled out the pockets of her slacks to show they were empty. The old man laughed, picked out a plum from a small heap of fruit, and handed it to her. “Then you must have this for comfort,” he said.
“There’s Mohammed Ali on his horse,” Paul said, looking down at the wharf. The equestrian statue towered above the crowds of people moving about the wharf. Mohammed Ali had once ruled Thasos. Now birds perched on his head.
“I’m glad we’re going home soon,” Paul said suddenly.
She could feel the meanness in her coil to strike like a snake. But she restrained herself and didn’t ask him how he could bear to think of leaving Jack Hemmings.
They went back to Limena in the late afternoon. There were two white goats tethered on the deck of the Maria, and they bleated mournfully all the way to the island. The cabin was full of people crowded on long wooden benches. Among them was Mr. Spyros who owned the movie theater. One of these days, he promised the Coreys, he would get a new film to show. By that time everyone in Thasos—except the nuns from the convent in Theologos—would have seen the film he was now showing, and that was only just, didn’t they agree?
As they walked home, Mr. Xenophon emerged from his store to ask them how their day in Kavalla had been. Mr. Kalligas, who must have spotted them from his house as they trudged up the slope, came out to remind them of the fair in Panagia next week. Lily had forgotten about it. Mr. Corey said he was eager to go. “I’m so glad we’ll see a real island fair and get to Panagia. More to remember.”
But Lily wasn’t so eager. She was sure that Mr. Hemmings would be there, honking and boasting, dancing and kicking up his heels.
They went to Efthymios-Onassis for supper. Afterward, in the warm dark beneath a sky full of stars, they started for home. Dimitrious stepped out of the shadows near the museum and, playing the bouzouki softly, walked with them all the way, whispering good night to them at their gate.
It had been a fine day, a day without Jack. But tomorrow he would be back. When he wasn’t showing off his bicycle tricks, he would be pulling leaves from shrubs, jumping at the lean stray cats that skulked in alleys, his hands and feet always moving. Even Rosa waddled away at a fast clip when Jack was in her vicinity.
Lily had seen him once on the deck of the Prinos boat. He had paced ceaselessly, fiddling with ropes, kicking at the railing. He was like an engine racing, with no place to go.
The sun-washed island, its meadows and slopes and mountains, grew gray and black and seemed to shrink beneath the violent rain that swept across it on the day of the Panagia fair. Cloud formations like a monstrous sky fleet turned black over Limena. A wind blew up, howling as it passed among the trees. The sea boiled and foamed. Shutters banged a
gainst walls. The house felt entirely different, like a cave smelling of damp stone and earth. Open stands and carts were quickly dragged inside beneath flapping canvas awnings that strained at their ropes. The rain beat down until Lily, looking out at the balcony, thought she was seeing the village under water that Jack had told them about.
Toward late afternoon the rain slackened. There was a long crack in the dark sky, and light poured through it like a ray from a lamp in the night. An intense scent of earth and plants rose from the garden and flooded the house with a green smell that was both rank and sweet. The sun struck the yard and the mulberry tree with points of light like the tips of arrows on fire. Gradually, the sky cleared and turned blue.
The storm brought the island the first good rain since the Coreys had been in Thasos. The wells would be full now, Lily knew, and the narrow streams in the mountains would become torrents that would overflow their banks.
The Coreys and the Haslevs were going to the fair together in two of the little taxis. Mr. Kalligas was to ride with them. He had told Lily the day before that he was especially glad to be going because, along with the fair there would be an engagement party for his great friend, Grigoris, and Juliana, the girl he was to marry.
Lily had run into Mr. Kalligas at the baker’s where he had just taken a joint of lamb to be roasted. He had told her about Grigoris. He had been in a serious accident on a fishing boat that crippled him so severely that he could get around now only on crutches. He was rich, Mr. Kalligas said. He owned three boats in the fishing fleet that set out every evening from the quay. And he had loved Juliana since he was a boy no older than Paul. But her parents did not want her to marry a crippled man.
“Every night for one week Grigoris put his crutches against Juliana’s house and sit down on the road. And every night Juliana’s mother and father look out and see him sitting there. All night long, and in the morning when they get up, he is still there. Seven days he do this.”
