Beautiful Animals

by Lawrence Osborne

  Gradually, the English girl lost her alarm; it was Sam who held herself tense and wanted to go back immediately. But Naomi calmed her with hand gestures. There was nothing threatening about the sleeper. He was abject and abandoned, self-abandoned even. The two drops of blood were his. A cut hand, a cut foot: his misery had expressed itself. There was a way of telling that he had come from the sea, not from the port, and that he was not sleeping through a surfeit of leisure. Suddenly there was motion in the skies and they looked up. Two huge birds were circling overhead, turning slowly and looking down at the three humans as if there was something in their arrangement that needed to be deciphered. Slowly, they dropped closer. The man turned equally slowly onto his back and his mouth fell open. His naked torso was covered with long weals and scratches, and the skin had begun to darken. They moved back to the ledge from where they had started out, one step at a time, not a pebble displaced.

  “He’s not dying,” Naomi said. “He’s just sleeping. He’s washed up from the sea.”

  Sam wondered aloud if they should go back anyway and talk to him. It seemed cowardly to just return without doing anything, without making contact.

  “Make contact?” Naomi smiled.

  “I didn’t mean it weirdly. I meant—just go down and see who he is. He was bleeding.”

  “Not today. Another time.”

  Naomi signaled and they set off back the way they had come, but more hurriedly.

  When they were close to their original landing, Naomi said, “We definitely shouldn’t say anything to your father. Nothing at all. Right?”

  “Nothing.”

  “I’m sure he’ll overreact. He’ll probably go to the police straightaway. He’ll think it’s the right thing to do.”

  She had reached out and gently locked a hand around Sam’s wrists so that the younger girl was forced to look up into her metal-steady blue eyes. There was a quivering little threat inside the pupils.

  “He’s an Arab, isn’t he?” Sam blurted out.

  There was a long silence as they worked their way back into view of the yacht, which had not after all dislodged itself in order to find them, and when they scaled the first hill on their itinerary they waved, as before, and the crew, who might have been growing a little anxious at their long absence, made signals in response as if it were they who had gone missing for a while.

  —

  When they got back to the port, Naomi and Sam slipped away by themselves and went to a taverna inside the labyrinth of alleys. It was dusk. The first moment of cool in many hours and they gulped down a carafe of Moschofilero at a table on the street. Around the amphitheater of the port rose the terraced captains’ houses of centuries past while, increasingly audible, starlings babbled in the trees of the squares. Birds on the wire, Naomi always thought, in honor of the Cohen song. Sam’s hands were shaking; she seemed about to launch into an outburst. But about what? I haven’t asked her to do anything outrageous, Naomi thought. I haven’t made her do something illicit. She hasn’t been forced.

  But Sam was not thinking that. She was, on the contrary, filled with an elated trepidation that was shy and quiet. She had the feeling that Naomi was thinking so fast that she wouldn’t be able to catch up with her, that she had an idea what to do, but entirely for her own reasons.

  “Don’t worry,” Naomi said now. “It’s just between us. You and me. We can do whatever we want. There’s nothing dangerous in it, Sam. We ought to help him.”

  “Even though we don’t know who he is.”

  “Does it matter who he is?”

  “Yes, it matters.”

  Naomi sighed. “It doesn’t matter. People like him are coming here on bits of wood. Don’t you think it’s appalling?”

  “Of course I think it’s appalling. But so what?”

  “Then we have a chance to help. I’m a lawyer—that’s what we do.”

  Sam rolled her shoulders and her tone was suddenly dismissive.

  “Really? I don’t think that’s your reason. I think you want an adventure.”

  “Well, if I did, it’s not a crime.”

  “No, it’s not a crime, but you’re talking to me like a lawyer. When in fact you don’t know who he is.”

  More gently, Naomi admitted that she didn’t. All right, she thought, maybe I’m atoning for coming from money that I didn’t earn. But would that be so bad? She lowered her voice and tried to be more persuasive. “Wanting to help the helpless is not an uncommon desire, and if you want me to explain it I’d say that I’m determined to make a difference. It’s not just an adventure. And if it is, it’s one with a purpose.”

  “My ass.”

  Sam pursed her lips and her face lost its color. She hadn’t really meant it, and she realized that what she’d said a few moments earlier sounded cowardly. Accordingly, she doubled down in order to disguise the fact.

  “It’s such a dumb situation to put yourself in. Now I have to hide something from my father, and I’ve never done that.”

  “You’ve never hidden anything from him?”

  “No.”

  “That’s hard to believe. Anyway, I can’t see what difference it makes. What’s he going to do if you tell him?”

  “It just feels gross.”

  “Trust me,” Naomi reassured her. “We should really wait and think a bit before we do anything. I know you’re interested to see what happens and you can rise to the occasion if we decide to help a migrant, but it can’t be something that’s really ours if your father knows about it—admit it!”

  “Let me think, then. It has nothing to do with my dad.”

  “Come on, let’s have some tsipouro and go home.”

  But Sam had felt the needle used against her, and the little wound bled. Before long, however, her mood picked up, spurred by the pomace brandy. Naomi gave her a crash course on this lesser-known Greek liquor. There was anise-flavored tsipouro and the plain kind. There was Tsililis and there was Kosteas; there was Idoniko without anise and Babatzim with it. Unlike ouzo, tsipouro was made from grapes and you could taste the pomace. And the anise here was fruity—Naomi taught her how to say one word for it, glykaniso. Tsipouro was also peerlessly alcoholic, it prised apart mind and spirit. They forgot about the Arab on the far side of the island and began talking about upcoming parties instead. Naomi explained to her how the scene worked in the summers: the families who returned every year, the famous artists who set up their studios between June and September, the influx of journalists and interns and hangers-on that made the parties unpredictable and fun. They knocked back three rounds of ouzo. Night had fallen without their noticing it, and the alleys glowed with their creamy whitened walls. Windows opened in the houses; from the upper floors came the sound of pianos and Tosca and Greek heavy metal. A smell of booze began to touch the air, but very lightly. The restaurants slowly filled up. The lights grew brighter. Into their own came wanderers and drifters looking for friends and interesting strangers, which meant of course pretty ones. Sam was alert with curiosity. It didn’t seem possible that such a social world could exist on such a small island. Many of them knew Naomi. They came up, embraced her, glanced with a smile at the young sidekick and stayed for a drink or two. There were some young Americans, too, boys more cynical and worldly than anyone she knew, and she was interested in the effect they had on her. Even the New York ones were not from her world, they were not what she was used to. Perhaps it was because here they were out of their element and therefore unleashed. Their eyes had a different cruelty and freedom. Their schools and parents were far distant and out of mind, and they were free to do as they liked: on their way to other people’s houses, to drinks parties on terraces above the port or yachts stationary for the night in the harbor. That was what summers were for. Soon Naomi and Sam were being whisked up to one of these parties as if it was the most normal thing in the world.

  They went to the villa of an elderly American painter whose name Sam should have known but didn’t; it was surrounded by one of the is
land’s characteristic high walls, and in the garden behind them tortoises inched their way through a garden of long grass studded with enormous fallen lemons. But why, she wondered, did they have candles soldered to their shells? This was Naomi’s world, and nothing about it was obvious. Yet there was an air of madness and fun that would probably last all night and without foreseeing it she had been dropped into that atmosphere at just the right moment.

  The painter Ed Milne was there with his wife, both ancient and burned to a handsome crisp by thirty reckless summers, and on the walls were his creations, small oblong abstractions of pale gray and blue with titles in Greek that she couldn’t understand. Oinopos Ponton, and so on. The rooms looked Ottoman as she wandered through them with her highball—a Turkish official had built the villa at the end of the eighteenth century—and soon she had lost Naomi and was among strangers, innocent and beautiful, as she was well aware, and with the added advantage of being unknown to them all. It was an advantage that might only last a single night, but it was a huge one all the same. But not all strangers enjoyed this privilege. She thought of the other one on his cliff sleeping out in the open, and she wondered whether he did, in fact, enjoy an advantage by virtue of being unknown. She couldn’t tell yet because he was not a stranger of the same sort. He was, thus far, almost entirely a creation of her own imagination.

  FIVE

  Over the next days, as they swam and sunbathed together on the remote beaches, they talked about what they would do. Gradually Naomi prevailed, and Sam agreed that the humanitarian thing to do would be to go back and bring the castaway a basket of food and some necessities. It was a simple thing to do and it was also a moral thing to do, and being both moral and simple it was an easy thing to do. Easy, simple, and moral: but it had to be planned. Every night Naomi monitored the Greek news in case their charge had been apprehended by the police, but he never appeared in the media and she heard no mention of him in the flow of island gossip, to which her nativized ear was attuned. He remained invisible, and the longer he did the more intensely she felt the emotion of her mission. She didn’t believe in signs, but there were surely signs involved here—to her mind, there was no one on the island who would be more sensitive to the issues than she was. She couldn’t possibly allow anyone else other than Sam to become involved in this salvation. But that said, she also needed Sam at her side, complicit and eager and docilely attuned to the project at hand. For Naomi, it could not be a solitary endeavor. She needed a platonic lover in her orbit.

  At nine one morning, when they should have been snorkelling near Mandraki, they rented a small skiff with an outboard, loaded it with two bags of groceries, and returned to the far side of the island.

  This time it was different. When they returned to the same place where they had seen him previously, they saw him at once, washing himself in the cove, using his hands as a little bucket. He wasn’t as handsome as Sam remembered, but his relaxed gaze and the body language, his resignation and indifference, served him well. The two women stopped and put down the bags and, with a nervous banality, waved. The man came out of the sea, dried himself, and sat down where he had slept. He dressed, but without hurrying, and Naomi turned to Sam, as if for the last time.

  “You see, it’s just him. There’s nothing to worry about. And there are two of us.”

  The man turned finally and waved back, a sign that encouraged, and they went down toward the beach with all the calm they could muster.

  He had pulled on socks and sneakers and a dark blue T-shirt, tattered and on the verge of disintegration by now, and next to him lay what appeared to be the most precious thing still in his possession, a bar of soap wrapped in paper. It was a scene of quiet ruin, at the center of which sat a man who was unruined. The long hair and beard, even, had been groomed with his fingers and flattened out. He’s about the same age as Naomi, Sam thought. A little older perhaps. She was gripped by a sudden doubt, but they had to talk, and as soon as they did the doubt ebbed away and she was left with human immediacies that demanded all of her attention. It was Naomi in any case who asked him if he spoke English or French, or even Greek, and he said, “The first two,” in English. She stood about six feet away, and her shadow fell across his face, as she intended. But she spoke as soothingly as she could, because although questions were unavoidable they could be uttered without alarm.

  “Where did you come from?”

  He pointed to the sea, but without any convincing vehemence.

  “You swam from a boat?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Where is it now?”

  He shaded his eyes to see her better. They were not calculating eyes, and they were not particularly inquisitive. Earth, Naomi thought. He has eyes of earth. His voice was soft, educated, slow in rhythm and the accent unobtrusive. His English was excellent. But that was not a remarkable fact in the world these days; an expensive school evidently underwrote his command of their language.

  “Gone—it’s just me.”

  “And the others?” Sam said.

  He waved a hand—no others.

  She didn’t believe him, but she said nothing.

  They set down the bags and opened them, and when the man saw peaches he clapped and shouted “Merci!”

  “We saw you the other day,” Naomi blurted out.

  It had to be explained, after all.

  There was the stilted moment when she had to hand him the little penknife she had brought with her to cut the peaches and the tomatoes. He took it and looked her in the eye; something grated between them. “I saw you too,” he said, turning to the peach in his hand. “But then you ran away.”

  “We came in a yacht—do you remember?”

  “I saw it. But you had Greeks with you.”

  “You don’t think I’m Greek?” Naomi chimed in.

  He said she had English written all over her.

  “What about me?” Sam said defiantly.

  “Australian.”

  Naomi turned to Sam. “This is Sam. She’s not Australian. She’s American. I’m Naomi.”

  “And my name is Faoud.”

  It was only then that Sam thought back to the time she had first seen him and remembered that he had been wearing tracksuit bottoms and thong sandals. The fantastical idea came to her that it was not, after all, the same person at all. We don’t know either way, she thought. Naomi doesn’t know any more than I do. We’re both in the dark.

  The dark, however, was not a bad place to be. They sat down beside him and all three cut up the bread and laid chunks of feta on the loaves with tomatoes sprinkled with some coarse salt they had brought with them. It was as if they had just met in a London park, strangers exchanging names and peaches. Faoud didn’t appear distrustful or distant; he seemed to have measured the two interlopers and judged them according to his own view of the world. He had been expecting them, or expecting someone. He said he had been considering scaling the mountain and making his own way to the windward side, though he had no idea what might lie there. A village, a town. There was always a village at the very least. There were always houses, places where you could ask for water or help. But it was a gamble to approach a house in the remoter islands, as many back in Turkey had told him. He asked Naomi what the name of this island was. When she told him he rolled the word around in his mouth and considered it. Hydra. It didn’t mean anything to him. He asked her what kind of place it was, the windward side. She said, “There’s a port, many houses, it’s a different world.”

  “Then I got lucky,” he said, lowering his eyes.

  “You came through Turkey?”

  He had, but there was no elaboration on his past. It was as if it was superfluous to make commentary on something so rudimentary.

  All right, she thought, he doesn’t want to go there.

  “When did you last eat?” Sam asked.

  “Many days ago,” he said.

  “It’s an abomination,” Naomi said, echoing her father’s tone.

  Seven days
before you die of starvation, Sam thought coolly.

  There was something about him she didn’t accept, a smooth quality that eluded her. Some elusive qualities in a man were acceptable, but others spelled unwelcome outcomes.

  “Eat the cheese,” Naomi said to Faoud. “Get the protein. I’ll bring something better tonight.”

  “Merci.”

  A line of vaporous cloud had formed at the horizon. As it spread and turned a hot silver, waves of new heat touched their faces. The summer was ripening into its full delirium. The sea darkened and lost its cool metallic sheen. When they glimpsed it now—suddenly, at the end of a lane or from a high set of steps—it had a feverish depth of color that made them momentarily forget that they were even in Europe. Exposed to the sun all day, and an equally feverous empty sky, the two women began to feel loosened, their consciousness deliciously weakened, and they thought of the cool conveniences of the port, the cafes at midday under the awnings, the iced beers and the siestas that would follow. But none of these things extended to Faoud; inevitably, then, they began to think of where their charity led next. Naomi immediately thought of the abandoned houses in Episkopi. She told him that he couldn’t possibly stay here on the beach, that it would be better to move into one of those. He bowed his head and said nothing.

  “You have to move today,” she went on. “Tonight. I’ll come back tonight and take you there.”

  “Really?” Sam burst out.

  She was uneasy and now also a little resentful at the pressure being applied to her. But Naomi was in fervor now.

  “There’s no other way. He’ll die out here. There are only a few shepherds in Episkopi and they use the houses for animal sheds. It’s the best place to hide him.”

  For a moment Sam thought of ditching the charity and simply going back to her family and their afternoon games of chess and backgammon. It would be so much easier than this pointless exertion. She suddenly resented both her own passivity and the relentless charity-worker passion of the older girl, in which to boot she didn’t quite believe. Naomi’s playful cynicism—the thing about her that most appealed to Sam—seemed to have disappeared in a baffling way from one day to the next. She could understand the logic of it, but why the determination to make a stranger into a moral cause? You could help a stranger without making him into a cause. You could inform people who could help. As far as she could tell from the news, the Greeks had been rather welcoming to the refugees coming from Turkey. But then again, she also remembered the new police who had begun to appear at the port, and it was equally possible that since Naomi knew more about this country than she did, she also knew better what the current climate of fear and paranoia might be. It could go either way, she admitted to herself. But nevertheless a dilemma had been forced upon her and it was one that she had not asked to be a part of.