She looked across at the man cramming his mouth with bread and olives, and of course she felt sorry for him. Days at sea floating on some piece of garbage with a single bottle of water. A flight from war and chaos in Syria, as she had read in the European papers a thousand times. One knew the images. But there had been something vague about his replies to Naomi’s questions. Their embarrassment had kept them from asking directly, but there was no reason not to probe any further. She wanted to ask him then, where exactly he was from, who his family were, and why he had had no choice but to wash up on this island rather than one closer to Turkey. But again she failed to make the move.
Naomi turned to her again and her expression was more forgiving—she knew that Sam would play along with it, that she was more interested in this than in silly parties.
“Let’s go back soon,” she said. “I need a beer. And we need to think. Don’t you agree?”
They got up and shielded their eyes from the sun. The man looked up sheepishly and he understood everything; there was nothing to explain to him. He was intelligent at least, the eyes responsive and alert to every human beat. He said, “Will you come back tonight?”
“We’ll come back after sundown and take you round to Episkopi if we can find a house there. We’ll go to Episkopi now and see.”
“It’s a great favor,” he said. “I can’t thank you enough.”
She wondered then if he had another plan. They walked back to the boat.
Out of earshot, Sam gave vent to her doubts.
“Oh, don’t think so much,” Naomi snapped. “He’s got a complicated story, so what? How could he not have a complicated story?”
But it wasn’t just complex, Sam shot back. It was vague and evasive.
“I didn’t think so,” Naomi countered. “What was evasive?”
“Do you think he’s a Christian or a Muslim?”
Naomi burst into laughter.
“What?”
“I said do you think he’s a Christian?”
“I don’t really care if he is or he isn’t. Should I have asked him? I’m not doing it for religious reasons.”
“What if he’s a Muslim?”
“I’d be even kinder.”
“Is it different if he’s Muslim?” Sam said. “Kindness isn’t the point.”
—
From the dock at the hamlet of Palamidas they climbed for an hour to Episkopi until they were among the ravines and uneven fields where cyclamen flowers survived. They sat on a stone wall and looked down at the sea, at the islands compact and bare, the shadow of Dokos and beyond it the pale mass of the Argolid. Hillsides swept down to a jagged coast met by water the color of gem silica, their steeply pitched surfaces maculate with gray rock and quivering sage. Lone gothic agaves thrust up unexpectedly, their heads torn sideways by the winds, and around them ancient wire donkey fences lay on the fields like tossed sea wreckage, patched up with discarded beds and old house doors. It looked like a land taking its time to die, to revert to prehistory. But its advantage was that there were many lonely ruined houses here which, since Naomi could speak Greek, she could bargain for if she found an owner.
By now the emotions of two hours earlier had dissipated. They were burned by the salt wind and their chattering minds had fallen silent. They walked around looking for people. Climbing to higher ground, they could see flocks of goats, a line of horses. Two men reclined in the wild grass, and it was clear they had been watching the girls for some time. Naomi had always thought that she knew everyone on the island, but these were unknowns, shepherds in their sixties in coarse patched shirts and braces, quietly alive beneath bursts of white hair. She spoke to them, they answered politely. She had to be careful what she said. It was enough to say that she needed a hut for herself and her friends to use occasionally over the summer. They liked to come out here to swim at the Nisiza peninsula nearby. She could offer a ridiculous price that they would never refuse.
They looked at the burnished American girl and something in them softened. It was her air of insolent innocence. One of the men had two huts he used for the animals; they were on high ground but easy to climb up to. He gestured to one of these buildings, a square structure about a hundred meters away, close to the path that ran all the way to the port. It could be hers if she really wanted it, though there was no electricity or water. There was a pallet the shepherd used to sleep on and some tools, including a bucket and a scythe. If she wanted to take it she could pay him later that day and the deal was done.
“All right,” she said. “I like the sound of that.”
They walked up to the hut together and looked inside it; the door had no lock. It was cool in the heat, and dry. There were no spiders and no drafts—it would do. She took it at once. The man was pleasantly surprised and did a little dance on his toes. She went over everything with him carefully. No one was to come up there after she had taken the hut. He was to tell no one that he had rented it out either. It was, she said, for social reasons. Her father would disapprove, and she didn’t want him to know. To seal the deposit she gave him a fifty-euro note, and she and Sam started back down toward Palamidas. The two men stood and watched them go with slightly mystified expressions. But soon the two girls were out of sight and the world returned once again to its normal state of torpor, heat, and boredom, a state in which they were both perfectly happy, offering as it did no expectations but divine and therefore inexplicable windfalls.
—
At Palamidas they waited for a while in the shade of a looming hill near the water. It was a desolate place, but lit by the fairy waters. The same pieces of rusted machinery littered the broken-up quay as at Mandraki. A small lamp with a solar panel attached to it, jetties with tires strapped to their sides. The beach was littered with splintered wood, like the scene of an explosion in a matchbox house. It was a place preoccupied by its own labors.
“What did you say to him?” Sam finally asked.
“Just money talk. I’m going to put Faoud in that hovel and the old man is going to rent it to me for the summer. It’ll be all right until I figure out something better.”
“He’ll be expecting a boutique hotel I bet.”
“Faoud?”
“He looks a little spoiled to me.”
“That’s not really the right word, is it? You don’t like him, do you?”
Sam shrugged and crossed her feet. She was merely grateful to be out of the punishing sun. She didn’t have any feelings about Faoud that weren’t physical, instinctual, and unthought.
“I don’t care one way or the other,” she felt compelled to state.
“I don’t believe you. You didn’t like him—I could tell.”
“But you do,” Sam said.
“So now it’s me?”
“You were all over him.”
“You were looking him over. You’re not fooling me.”
“Come on, I wasn’t.”
“I saw it all. It doesn’t matter anyway. You can like who you want.”
Sam looked away for a moment. She had to decide whether to be honest or to spin a tale. In the corner of her eye she had caught the arthritic motion of two old women in the black garb of a previous century making their way across the space behind the landing in the shade of a dark rose parasol. Humans are like spiders in their old age, moving from shadow to shadow in the bright sun, inexhaustible in their way. She would never end up like that, even if she stayed here for the rest of her life, which of course she wouldn’t. In New York, she wouldn’t age like that. She would rebel. Then she decided not to answer Naomi at all: yes, Faoud was beautiful, but she didn’t see any reason to explain being interested in that. It was her business, her weakness, if it was a weakness at all, and it was purely a private crisis. Beautiful things subdue. It didn’t concern anyone else. It was a mystery within one devotee. They sailed, therefore, back to Hydra in silence. Sam was happy with that. When they got to Kamini the girl disembarked, kissed Naomi’s cheek, and walked off to the family villa
alone on the long path to Vlychos. Naomi went back to Belle Air and slept through the afternoon.
—
The Haldanes had dinner at home that night. The maid made lemon soup and moussaka, and as they ate on the patio, lightning flickered against the edge of the nocturnal sea. Thunder rolled in after it, distant and soft, and the wind picked up; the candle flames guttered. “So it’s going to rain?” her mother said, looking up at her and trying to guess where her daughter had been for so many hours earlier that day. After the meal was finished and the plates cleared away, Sam lay on the outdoor sofa and ate galaktoboureko with cups of Lipton’s doused in sliced lemon. The family gathered around the coffee table with jazz on the record player, and bits of paper flew around the patio on the gusts of wind. Her father, his newspaper open wide—yesterday’s Tribune—tapped his foot to the Louis Jordan and puffed at his pipe.
“By the way,” he drawled, not removing the stem, “your mother and I were stopped by the police walking back from the port. Can you imagine? Guys with automatics. We nearly had a brawl.”
“It wasn’t me who got upset,” Amy put in immediately.
“They stopped us and asked us for our passports. Obviously we didn’t have them on us.”
The paper lowered, and Jeffrey caught his daughter’s eye from the other side of the glass table.
“Has that happened to you, Sam?”
“Never.”
“You see, Amy? They stop middle-aged people in broad daylight but not kids on the lam all night. Stupid as they are intrusive.”
Sam suggested that it was just the summer drugs season. But Jeffrey insisted on the “lurch to the right” that was all the talk in the Tribune. Had they seen what was happening in Hungary and Poland?
She yawned, lying on her side, and resolved not to allow any of his peroration to penetrate her inner calm. She knew why there were armed police on the island because she already knew more than her father in that regard. It was easy enough to piece together. Curiously, she didn’t share any of his outrage at the rightward lurch, the demanding of passports, the events in Hungary. She had been listening to the same social justice indignations all her life, and gradually they had lost their effect on her. What did the word “fascist” mean after all these years, after all the repetitions and misuse? She heard it all the time in school, and it was a word that now passed her by in the night. As she reached her twenty-first year she began to realize that she intuited more about the world as it really was than her well-informed father, precisely because everything he knew was pre-known from texts and could not be contradicted by any real lived experience—because he didn’t have any. Whereas she had looked into the eyes of Faoud and kept it a secret from him. Her father’s indignations seemed naive and bookish. But she listened for a while and agreed with him, then stood and announced that she was going up to sleep. It was a way of not being abrupt or rude. He nodded, however, obviously perplexed. Was there something wrong with her?
She kissed her mother’s hot face and said she was tired. The rain was coming. On her bed upstairs she lay with the windows open, listening to it falling quietly over the pines, and her thoughts drifted until a message came from Naomi: All done with the shipwreck.
Sam texted back, Well done. That was gutsy.
Ten minutes later came another text: Exhausted, going to sleep for 24 hours.
Me too, she wrote back, and then the messages fell silent for the night. But although it was true that she was exhausted, she couldn’t sleep. She thought about Faoud in the hut at the far end of the island and the faces of the two shepherds, which had seemed, at least to her, to be full of duplicitous resolutions. But maybe that was wrong. My imagination, she thought dismissively. But still, she didn’t quite believe herself. She didn’t quite believe in her own disinterest in Faoud either. More than that: she wondered if the young man lying on that pallet in the dark was thinking about her in turn, and she was quite sure that, in his way, he was.
SIX
Carissa was alone in the house when Naomi came home after midnight. The maid could tell at once that Naomi had been drinking heavily, because the girl slammed doors and threw her boots across the hall floor, crashing her way upstairs to her room. The Codringtons themselves were long asleep, dulled by their sleeping pills and booze. Their snores could be heard throughout the house, even in her little cell sunk in the basement under thick floors. It was a disgusting sound, a sound commensurate with her bestial employers, and usually she wore earplugs to specifically screen it out when she tried to sleep.
That night they were in full roar, like huge fattened tropical frogs. Carissa stepped into the corridor outside her room and crept to the stone stairs leading up to the ground floor. Her curiosity was aroused. The family’s tensions were mysterious, almost magical to her, and she lost no opportunity to observe them. Sensing before long that the entire family was unconscious, she went up to the hall and picked up the boots that had been thrown down so insolently. It sometimes shocked her, Naomi’s disrespect to her own father. But she also felt solidarity with the tormented girl against her overbearing and arrogant stepmother. She arranged the boots neatly against the wall and noticed that they were caked with fresh mud. So Naomi had gone on a long walk somewhere in the rain, and not in the port. She must have wandered up to the hills. It was a curious detail. Carissa went into the salon and sat for a while in the armchairs that were forbidden to her during work hours, then stole a sip of brandy from one of the decanters standing on the drink service trolley. She often did this when her employers were asleep. It was her little revenge.
She stopped by the family photographs on the large table in the salon and looked at the faces of Naomi at twelve, fifteen, and twenty—you could see trouble coming into the eyes. She went up the stairs a little and tried to catch a noise from Naomi’s room, but the girl seemed fast asleep too and unlike her elders her sleep was always silent. Carissa went back to her own room half tipsy and determined to wake up at dawn exactly. This she was able to do.
When she started cooking in the kitchen at first light it was still raining, a fine soundless drizzle. She made a potato tart, which Jimmie loved in the morning, and a honey-and-egg concoction baked with filo. They were always up early and they were always hungry. At six-thirty the master came down first in his dressing gown, his hair wet and brushed back. He found her in the kitchen and gave her a playful pat on the behind, to which she had grown accustomed. She led him on a little; it made the tips bigger. As she was pouring his coffee, he said, “Carissa, have you seen my daughter?”
“She came in late last night.”
He asked her where Naomi had been and she said she had no idea.
“Bloody nuisance,” he muttered, and went into his food with a pleasureless resolve. It was, after all, the best way to avoid domestic troubles.
Carissa went back to the kitchen and hovered by the door, listening. The master was talking on the phone to one of his henchmen in London. His name was Rockhold, a sort of private investigator. Her English was now good enough to understand most of what they said, and she thought that he was asking this Rockhold to check Naomi’s records and bank accounts in England and Italy. The family had a large villa just north of Rome that Naomi also used. Their affairs were complex, and the master could not manage them alone. Soon the mistress came in, the master ended his call abruptly, and Carissa went out to serve her coffee. Phaine, as always, inspected the food casually and made a few sharp criticisms. The toast was a little burned; the eggs were a little dry. Carissa bowed with a “Yes, madame” and apologized. It was a ritual without much substance, a quiet way of humiliating her and keeping her in her place and on her toes. Like the pats on the behind, she had gotten used to it.
“And, Carissa,” Phaine said then, “don’t ever boil the coffee a second time. I know you do it occasionally because you’re lazy. Don’t. You think I can’t tell the difference, but I certainly can.”
“Yes, madame.”
The day passed glumly
. Naomi came down at midday for her coffee and drank it while Carissa made her pancakes. The girl seemed restless and distracted. When the sun came out she took her coffee onto the terrace and sipped it with her knees drawn up under her chin. The tension in her had increased. The Codringtons had gone out for lunch, and Carissa took the opportunity to talk to her. She was allowed to do it, since Naomi treated her as the only person in the household in whom she could confide.
“They went to Athens yesterday,” the maid said now. “I think Phaine wanted to buy summer clothes.”
“Did my father say anything to you?”
“No. He was on the phone to London. Something about an investigator. I didn’t hear anything else.”
Naomi put her face in her hands, and Carissa noticed that her nails were filthy and jagged.
“God, they never let up, do they?”
“No, miss.”
“I couldn’t sleep last night. I remember you told me once you knew an herbal sleep aid that the islanders use. Do you know how to get some, Carissa?”
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