“Let’s take that discus down to the college now,” he said. “With Giuseppe away, it’s our only chance.”
“I was going to have lunch,” Henry said.
“Good, good, we’ll eat together at Zygos’s Taverna.”
Professor Peterson’s car occupied the extremely rare privilege of being the most battered automobile that had ever clunked and overheated its way along the Athenian roadways.
It was a dirt-brown Renault 16 the professor said he had bought when he still had hair. He had driven it over 1.3 million miles, most of which were accrued on long desert roads in the Middle East. According to the professor, the mileage clock had broken in 1983 and then started going backward in 1989. The professor said that when it got to zero, he would give it back to Renault with a ribbon tied around the bumper.
The dashboard was a mass of twisted wires (one of which was live) and the instruments were too dusty to read. Pinned to the sagging upholstery roof were photographs of the car at famous digs in Europe and the Middle East. According to the professor, the car had led a far more interesting life than any one person he had ever met. It was once stuck in the sand in Egypt and had to be pulled out by camels. It took two bullets running the Iraqi border into eastern Turkey with a half-ton statue strapped to the roof that Professor Peterson had stolen from thieves who had stolen it from pirates who had stolen it from an international arms dealer. In the end it turned out to be a fake.
In snowy Poland at Biskupin, the old Renault had rolled down a small embankment, almost crushing a Polish archaeologist, who was saved only by her enthusiasm for archaeology—the depth of her excavation pit. It was stolen in Nigeria, only to be abandoned that afternoon when the thieves realized the entire backseat had been taken over by a fourteen-inch Hercules Baboon spider.
The professor sat in the car with his foot on the brake pedal while Henry removed the bricks from under the wheels that prevented it from rolling off the cliff.
The car was missing several windows and the sunroof had rusted open in 1986 during an African rainy season.
The professor had converted the trunk of the car into a soft nest of blankets and hammocks—not as a place to sleep, but as a safe haven for whichever artifact he was transporting at the time. The professor boasted of the various artifacts he’d had in the backseat the way a teenager brags about sexual conquests.
They careened down the side of the mountain without talking. Then they trundled through the iron bridge, at which point the professor began to talk and talk. Henry could hear nothing except the engine, and a strange banging that came from underneath whenever Professor Peterson tapped the brake pedal.
At the first traffic light on the edge of the city, Henry was finally able to hear what the professor was saying.
“And did you know I once had an infestation of killer bees in this car?”
Henry replied that he did not know, but suspected a joke. The light turned green.
At the next red light, the professor was suddenly audible again.
“ . . . with several newborns. Newborns!”
When the light changed, the professor pulled across six lanes of traffic to the fury of other drivers, and then turned abruptly down a side street. He was a dangerous driver—which in Athens meant he was safe. Despite being almost eighty years old, he had adopted the Greek custom of ignoring every important red light and only pulling out to overtake a slower car when he spotted a vehicle racing toward them in the opposite direction.
As the professor swung the Renault down an even narrower side street, a figure stepped into the road from behind a parked car. The Renault’s fender clipped him hard and from the corner of his eye Henry saw a body sprawl onto the sidewalk.
The professor skidded to a stop. Henry threw open his door and sprinted back to the motionless body of the man on the ground. He was wearing a crumpled tan suit that was torn under one arm. Henry knelt down and began a routine he’d practiced in his first-aid classes. The man was alive and breathing—but seemed barely conscious. He also appeared to have a black eye and stitches in his face.
“My god, look at him,” the professor said. “What have I done? My god, my god.”
“I won’t know how badly he’s hurt until he comes around and I can talk to him—or we take him to hospital ourselves.”
“My god,” the professor said. “This is unbelievable.”
“I know—his face has taken a bit of a knock.”
But then the man on the ground opened his eyes. He took a long breath and let his gaze fall sullenly upon the two men standing above him.
“Something’s happened to me, hasn’t it?” he said.
Professor Peterson and Henry recoiled at the stench of anise, fennel, and raisins—the ingredients of ouzo.
The professor nudged Henry and mouthed the words, “He’s blind drunk.”
“Yes,” the professor said. “Something has happened to you.”
“You speak English?” Henry said to the man.
“I clipped you with the car,” the professor interrupted. “You stepped out into the road, you understand,” the professor leaned down. “I’m very, very sorry, old chap.”
The man tried to sit up.
“No, no, it’s all my fault,” the man admitted. “Wine.”
“You’re drunk?” Henry said.
The man seemed not to hear.
“Are you in pain?” Henry asked.
“Not any more than usual, I suppose,” the man admitted with a strange smile.
Henry and Professor Peterson helped him to his feet. He introduced himself as George. His pants were also ripped and there were bloodstains around the tear.
“Sorry we almost killed you, George, but tell me,” Henry said, “what are all those bruises on your face and the stitches?”
“Oh, these darlings?” George said casually. “A common misunderstanding.”
“Have you been to hospital?” the professor asked.
George shook his head. “There’s little point—the human body is capable of sustaining much worse.”
“Well, George—I’m Professor Peterson, an archaeologist digging here in Athens, and I have rooms at the university, you understand. Let’s go there now. Henry here—who has a certificate in first aid—can patch you up properly and make sure you don’t need any X-rays.”
“If you really think I need looking after,” George said. “I’ll go with you.”
Henry helped George climb into the long backseat of the Renault.
“It’s filthy back here,” George muttered.
“Would you mind driving, Henry?” the professor said.
“Why is it so dirty back here?” George said again.
“Ever hear of a Nigerian Hercules Baboon spider?” the professor exclaimed.
“Definitely not,” George said.
Henry watched him in the mirror—not with coolness or relief, but with a compassion that extended beyond the moment, as though behind the bruised eyes and the quivering mouth he could sense the presence of a small boy the world had forgotten about.
Chapter Twenty-Three
Professor Peterson’s office was the most dangerous place on campus. Books piled ten feet high leaned dangerously in various directions. On the tallest tower of books, a note had been hung halfway up:
Please walk VERY slowly or I may fall on you without any warning, whatsoever.
There were three oak desks with long banker’s lamps that the professor liked to keep lit, even in his absence. On his main desk were hundreds of Post-it notes, each scribbled with some important detail or addendum to his thoughts. There were also hundreds of pins stuck in a giant map that had been written on with a fountain pen. The ashtrays were full of pipe ash and the room had that deep aroma of knowledge: old paper, dust, coffee, and tobacco.
“This is my dream home,” George said, trailing Henry through the stacks toward a battered chaise.
“It’s like a museum, isn’t it, George?”
“A museum that shou
ld be in a museum,” George said.
“Don’t mind the stuffing,” Henry said, when they reached the chaise. “This couch once belonged to a princess of Poland whom the professor said he was in love with.”
“So how did he end up with her chaise?”
“Who knows,” Henry said. “I can’t imagine Professor Peterson with a woman unless she’s been mummified.”
“Nice you spend so much time together,” George said.
“Well, we work together.”
“That’s even better.”
“What was he like growing up?”
“Growing up?”
“Did your mother come along too?”
“My mother?”
“To the archaeological sites, I mean,” George said ardently.
“No,” Henry said, quite confused. “My mother never came to work with me.”
“So it was just you and your father.”
Henry laughed. “Professor Peterson is not my father, George.”
“He’s not?”
“Well, in a way—he’s like my second father.”
“It shows,” George said, looking around the room. “Don’t suppose you have anything to drink here?”
Henry eyed him with mild scorn. “Well, perhaps after I’ve patched you up. The professor has some single malt somewhere.”
George sat on the battered chaise.
“If you want me to look at your knees you’d better take your trousers off.”
George quietly undressed.
“I’ll unbutton my shirt too,” George said. “I have a feeling my back is grazed.”
“Okay.”
“Is my nose bleeding?”
“It doesn’t look like it.”
George stripped down to his pinstriped boxer shorts, but kept on his black oxford shoes, black socks, and sock garters. Henry opened a rusty tin box with a red cross on it and removed pads, gauzes, swabs, and disinfectant. Then he gently felt the area on George’s leg where the wound was.
“There’s actually quite a bit of swelling,” Henry said. “But I don’t think we need to have an X-ray—unless you’re really in a terrible mess and hiding it from us.”
“A terrible mess?”
Henry peered up at him.
“Are you in a terrible amount of pain, George?”
George hesitated.
“Not really,” he said.
“Then I’ll just clean and bandage.”
“How do you know all this?” George asked.
“Two terms at medical college spent looking at bodies.”
“So you’ve had more than a first-aid course.”
“Yes I have—the professor likes his jokes though.”
As he wrapped the bandage around George’s knee, the sensation of Henry’s hand brushing his leg slowed George’s breathing. There was such tenderness in Henry’s hands that George felt quite giddy and had no memory of falling asleep.
When George opened his eyes, Henry was staring at him from a chair he had placed next to the chaise.
“What were you dreaming about?” Henry asked.
“I didn’t even know I was asleep,” George said, struggling to sit up.
Henry switched on a few floor lamps, and then cooked some Greek coffee on the professor’s rusty stove. When the coffee was ready, Henry looked for the professor’s single malt and then poured some into their coffee cups.
“You’re not here with the American School of Archaeology?” Henry asked quietly.
“No,” George said. “I graduated two years early from university and wanted to get a head start on my PhD.”
“Where are you from in America?” Henry said.
“Morris County, Kentucky,” George said. “Originally. Very pretty if you like woods and meadows.”
And then Henry asked George to tell him more. George spoke in a soft voice. Henry closed his eyes to imagine trees swaying, clear rivers, and then summer—an unbearable heat, green wilderness packed with the tightness of a fist.
“Sounds like paradise,” Henry said.
“It’s close to it,” George said. “But I spent most of my childhood at boarding school in the Northeast.”
“They have boarding schools in the States?” Henry asked.
“Oh yes,” George said. “With uniforms and everything.”
Henry pointed toward George’s ankles. “I like your sock garters. I have a pair too, somewhere.”
George asked for more scotch.
Henry brought the bottle back to the chaise. He took a swig and then passed it to George, who took a long drink.
“So what do you do here, George?”
“Apart from drink and get my heart broken?”
“And get run over,” Henry added.
“I’m exploring the vast field of ancient languages.”
“Interesting,” Henry muttered, suddenly preoccupied. “Can I show you something?” He rushed over to the professor’s desk and found a paper copy of the script written on the professor’s discus.
He handed it to George. “Can you make any sense of this?”
George scrutinized it for a minute. “Honestly?”
“Yes, honestly.”
“No,” George said.
Henry looked disappointed.
“Because it looks like Lydian,” George said. “And that’s very hard to translate.”
As the afternoon light deepened into gold, the two men leafed silently through centuries-old dictionaries in a bid to translate the text before the professor returned.
Henry switched on the radio, and the turning of pages was accompanied by the crackle of Haydn’s La Fedeltà Premiata. They moved only to smoke and drink coffee.
The translation would have taken much less time had George and Henry not been constantly sidetracked by interesting but unrelated chapters, which they felt compelled to share with one another.
The sentences and paragraphs that Henry found interesting George copied into his orange notebook.
George liked to read his digressions aloud without looking up from the page.
Henry listened. The sound of George’s voice made him feel as though he were drifting above his life.
When he opened his eyes, the recitation had ceased.
“It’s like we’re long lost brothers,” George said.
When the professor burst in an hour later, he found George and Henry asleep on the chaise. George was sitting upright, while Henry lay partially upon George, using his shoulder as a pillow.
George was the first to wake up. The professor stared down at him superciliously. He was holding George’s translation that Henry had pinned to the door.
“I hope, George,” Professor Peterson said, lighting his pipe, “that you don’t have any plans tomorrow.”
“Tomorrow?”
Then Henry woke up.
“Thought you might like to see the dig where you’ll be working from now on,” the professor went on, puffing out smoke.
The tobacco sizzled.
“Where I’ll be working?” George said.
“Excellent,” Professor Peterson said. “It’s all settled then. Welcome to the family.”
Chapter Twenty-Four
Rebecca and the topless man stood facing one another in the hall. It was very hot. The skin on his chest and shoulders glistened. Rebecca set down her backpack and easel.
“Do you speak English?” she said. “French?”
She hoped he might motion her inside again.
“Liga,” he said, finally. “Speak little English. What do you want?”
Rebecca explained that she was a friend of the foreigner for whom he had left the fish. She said that she was an artist and wanted to draw him.
From the short time she had lived in Athens, she had learned that there is little point in trying to deceive a Greek. It was an art they had perfected even before their victory at Troy.
Rebecca explained how she’d seen him from the window. He didn’t seem angry or saddened by her request but
just stood very still gazing at her. He had walked down the backs of his sandals. The radio was on in his apartment and played some ancient opera.
“You real artist,” he said in a way that wasn’t clear whether he meant it as a statement or a question. But then he moved aside for her to enter and she did.
His apartment was empty but for a few straw chairs, an old television with thick dust on the glass, and an industrial broom. The radio sat on top of the television. Clean folded towels were stacked on a table in one corner, and on a chair were slung several dirty towels. From the kitchen she could hear bubbling. Rebecca wondered whether she should ask why he boils towels when he suddenly explained how the towels were from a nearby hospice, and that after someone died, the towels needed to be boiled clean.
He asked her to sit down by pointing at a chair. Then he went into the kitchen. The faucet squeaked. He returned with a glass of water.
“Nero,” he said.
He tilted his head to one side as she drained the glass. Then he took the glass back to the kitchen. The walls of his room were yellow with cigarette smoke. The only single piece of decoration was a painting hung beside the window—a reproduction of Munch’s The Storm. A white, veiled figure running from dusk into wilderness. This man’s life, Rebecca felt—is a slow plummet.
Pain drawn out by thought.
He returned with a second glass of water. She took a gulp and put it down. He watched. Then he asked where she was from and about her childhood. She said: “My mother abandoned us.” He shrugged. “Tell me a nice moment,” he said. “Remember something nice for me and I’ll let you paint me.”
And so she let herself fall back through the past, until her memory with seeming randomness pulled a postcard from her life, and she told the story of an old piano she and her sister found washed up on a beach. They were bright little girls then, vacationing with their grandfather in rainy Deauville. The next day the piano had gone, carried back out to sea on the tide. She was especially upset. Later that night her grandfather found some paper and told her to draw it, to bring it back with her memory.
Rebecca’s drawing of a piano that washed up. Age 6.
The topless man motioned with his hands upon an imaginary keyboard and then lit a cigarette. Then he offered the pack to Rebecca, and they smoked together.
Everything Beautiful Began After Page 9
