Beautiful Animals

by Lawrence Osborne

  “I can find some for you.”

  “Maybe some hemlock. I know it grows here. My friends used to talk about it all the time. They were convinced the Mialou widow was killed with it.”

  They chuckled—the Mialou story was a famous one.

  “It’s certainly true,” the maid agreed.

  “It’s a Greek specialty. Socrates and all that.”

  “Yes, miss.”

  “But just some lemon balm would be all right. Just to relax and chill.”

  “I know a woman who sells everything.”

  “Ne pethani o charos!”

  “Yes, miss. I’ll go up the mountain this afternoon and find her. I promise.”

  Naomi went up to her, kissed her cheek.

  “You’re my savior in this madhouse. If it wasn’t for you I’d have gone mad myself.”

  Maybe you already did, the maid thought. It’s possible.

  “And, Carissa—I need some antibiotics and some bandages. Can you get me some of those too?”

  “I’ll get them.”

  “I scratched myself yesterday on my hike.”

  Carissa looked at her slyly. “I can get whatever you want—just ask me.”

  Carissa eventually left the terrace to finish her duties in the kitchen. An hour later the house was empty. The heat had returned, the sun festering on the prickly pear along the walls. She locked the outer door as she always did and went down the long flights of steps into the village. Later in the afternoon she came back with the medications and herbs. The medicine woman had been at home and she had bought a dozen different kinds of plants, leaves, roots, and flowers. She had bought a sachet of hemlock leaves and root as well, because she could use a tiny amount to prepare a sedative useful in the treatment of anxiety and mania. The girl could use it, as far as she could see. It would calm her down and restore her balance. Konio—its name meant “whirling” in Greek, but its effect could be the opposite. She made rabbit for dinner and then went to her room and slept for an hour.

  When she woke she heard the Codringtons bumbling around in the salon playing records and tinkering with the drinks cabinet. The service bell rang. She dressed hastily in her uniform and ran upstairs to find them seated in deck chairs on the terraces with vodka tonics that they had made themselves. It was a strike against her. But Phaine said nothing. Instead, she asked wearily for some small sandwiches impaled on cocktail sticks. The couple seemed relaxed after their excursion to Athens. Dusk came down with swallows and ships’ horns and distant cicada calls. A neighbor stopped by, one of the ancient Americans who lived in the hills like solitary crabs. There were a few rounds of salty laughter, and then he left. By nightfall the Codringtons were merry with drink. At eight dinner was served, and Naomi was there in a white summer dress like a high-society penitent, her hair scooped up around a wooden pin and twisted into a whorl.

  “Get a bottle of the Santorini, will you?” Jimmie said to Carissa, barely looking at her.

  She went back to the kitchen and waited for further orders. The meal was long, and they were talking heatedly. From time to time a half-shouted word flared up and then she went out, poured some wine, and they behaved themselves in front of her. Phaine at least had a horror of misbehavior in front of the servants. Soon, however, a full-blown argument blew up between Jimmie and Naomi. The English was so fast and confused that Carissa couldn’t understand a word. The girl began crying and then hurling insults at both Jimmie and Phaine. She calmed for a while and then it all exploded a second time. This time Naomi threw a glass. It shattered against the wall and the girl stormed off the terrace. Enraged, Jimmie ran after her and bawled something nasty into the hall as Naomi was pulling on her boots. He managed to stop her leaving, but she wouldn’t come back to the table. “For God’s sake,” he kept shouting, pacing up and down until he had exhausted himself and came back to the table where Phaine sat in icy silence.

  The girl went up to her room and Carissa brought out the coffee. Phaine addressed her at once.

  “You’re not to say a word about this to anyone outside of this house. Is that understood?”

  “Yes, madame.”

  “If I find that you did, you’ll be fired immediately.”

  But in fact Carissa didn’t feel that the argument was disgraceful. She felt it was long overdue. The following morning, as she made the day’s first coffee, Naomi reappeared, refreshed by a long sleep and carrying a beach bag filled with bottled water and cans of tuna. She was going for another long hike in the hills. “I hope you weren’t afraid of us last night,” she said to Carissa, taking her hands for a moment and pressing them.

  “I wasn’t.”

  “It’s sweet of you to say. Tell my father I won’t be back for dinner. I’m going to eat alone in town. I think I need to be away from them for twenty-four hours, and they probably feel the same way. Just hang in there, sweet Carissa—I’ll see you’re all right in the end. I really will. We have to stick together.”

  But Carissa was not sure who the “we” were. It was possible that, in the last resort, it did not include her.

  SEVEN

  Naomi went down to the port, met Sam there, and hired the same skiff she had taken the previous time. By nine they were at Palamidas, the waters still, the boats piled high with dejected-looking tackle. It took them less than an hour to climb up to Episkopi.

  He must have seen them coming, because when the girls reached the first of the houses the shepherd-landlord was there waiting for them, a shotgun slung jauntily across the back of his neck and a dog seething at his feet. But he was cordial to Naomi; he called her despinis, miss.

  “That friend of yours,” he said, looking her in the eye with a fearless condescension that didn’t retreat one inch or give any quarter, “he’s quite a character, isn’t he? You didn’t mention anything about single men sleeping up here alone.”

  But Naomi brushed him off.

  “It’s a favor I’m doing him. Did he do anything wrong?”

  The man shook his head slowly.

  “Not that I know of. But I’m sure it isn’t legal, him being up here. I’d say the rent I charged you is a steal.”

  It was obvious what he was getting at, but she had to control her sudden anger.

  “All right,” she muttered. “How much should it be, then?”

  “He’s an Arab.”

  The word he used was Arapis. Einai Arapis.

  She concealed her slight shock—it was a crude old word.

  “It doesn’t matter what he is.”

  “Got nothing against them myself. But it’s illegal. If he’s an Arab it’s different.”

  And the second time, as if registering her distaste, he had changed the word to the more normal Aravas.

  “A hundred euros?” she tried.

  It was an over-the-top bribe, and he seemed not to believe his luck for a moment. Perhaps he should push for more.

  “I have fifty here,” she said. “I’ll give you fifty tomorrow.”

  He took the notes and then stepped back a little.

  “It should really be fifty a week extra for the risk I’m taking,” he said.

  “It’s no risk.”

  She wanted to snap at him, but it would get her nowhere and they both knew it. She gave him the fifty; he lowered the shotgun off his shoulders into the crux of his elbow and moved aside.

  “If your boy steals anything, it’s you who pays,” he said as she walked away from him. “I’ll know where to find you.”

  So you know who I am, she thought.

  He watched her go up toward the hut.

  “Remember that!” he called after her. “Even an egg.” Then he added, “Goustareis Araves?” Did she like Arabs?

  The hut’s door was open and Faoud was sitting in the sun on the far side, out of view of her antagonist. He was drying his socks on flat stones and washing his face in a bowl of water. Naomi had brought him razors and shaving cream this time, and a small mirror from the pharmacy. He hadn’t asked for them,
but it had seemed to her that it was the most expedient way to make him blend in with the Greeks. The shepherd now turned and walked away, the dog following him.

  Faoud seemed to understand what had been discussed.

  “I think you should shave now,” she said. “You look like a cannibal. It’s almost depressing.” He agreed, and he seemed to find it amusing, saying that the old people in the houses were afraid of him—isn’t that what they had said? But he caught Sam’s eye as he spoke, and in some way that quieted him.

  “Not really. But you’ll look better cleaned up.”

  They had brought scissors as well, and Sam offered to cut his hair. She sat behind him and sheared off the matted excess hair while he shaved, the reflection of his face held still in the mirror. She enjoyed it; she’d never done anything like that before. The slope of his neck was that of a girl’s; his skin could have been coated with honey.

  When she was finished she brushed the hair from his shoulders and looked at him from the side. It was a remarkable improvement. Naomi asked if he wanted to go for a swim; there was a remote path that went down from Episkopi to the far side which no one used.

  “I know it,” he said. “But I think it would be better to stay here. Someone will see us.”

  “It’s not the end of the world if they did. You’re respectable now. Let’s go down there.”

  He hesitated, then relented. A swim with two girls. “What did you tell the farmers?” he asked.

  “I said you were a friend.”

  “They won’t believe it. I don’t look like a friend, and they know it.”

  “Maybe they don’t care. I brought you some T-shirts and a sweater. Don’t thank me—they were cheap.”

  He put on one of the T-shirts and suddenly he looked clean-cut, austere, and curiously middle class. What he really needed was a shower, but it would have to wait.

  “We’ll clean you up, and then I can get you a room in the port.”

  They had brought a box of eggs, and Sam took them out now so that he could eat them raw, one after the other.

  Then he lay down in the grass. The cessation of hunger had relaxed him.

  “You’re not a very good Greek,” he said to Naomi. “You burn like an Irish girl. Are you Irish?”

  “How would you know about Irish girls?”

  “Well, then,” he began:

  “I’ve been around. I went to Paris and London when I was small. My father took me. He told me everyone there was really Irish. He bought me a tie at Old England. Do you know that store?”

  Naomi shook her head, and she was incredulous, her heart skipping a beat to find that he was more bourgeois than she was.

  “It’s near the Opéra in Paris. My father loved it. He bought all his ties there. He still had them when he died. I would have inherited them if I’d stayed.”

  So, Sam thought slowly, listening to this, you come from money. You know what Old England ties are, and your father was a man of leisure.

  “You haven’t said where you’re from,” she said. “We thought it would be rude to ask—so I’m not asking.”

  “I don’t mind if you ask, because I won’t tell you.”

  She took out the strawberries they had brought and the yogurt. Dessert.

  “Mais tu me gâtés!” he cried, and swore he would buy them dinner when he was rich again. His fingers, as they darted for the fruit, were suddenly elegant and discriminating.

  “We’ll see if you do,” Sam retorted.

  It didn’t seem likely. For some reason she disliked his use of a French phrase, though she knew it was irritable on her part, and there was something in his unexpected confidence that struck her as being less innocent than Naomi wanted to believe. When he glanced at her his eyes were clear of all deference or doubt. He seemed to know what he was looking at, and it was not an indulgent knowledge. Her pride flared up in defense of herself, and she thought of a few sharp words she could fling at him later on, when the right occasion presented itself. It was a little more than the usual male insolence.

  They ate the yogurt on plastic spoons and threw the strawberries to each other one by one. Maybe, Naomi thought, this silly laughter will reach all the way down to the shepherd with the shotgun. Gossip and islands were natural conspirators, but the time for caring about it was almost gone.

  Naomi wondered whether she could bring him down to the port and check him into a hotel without a passport, or using her own. It was one way of bringing him back into civilization. Then she considered buying him a ferry ticket and getting him to the mainland. Yet there was no possibility of continuation in this plan once he got there. She could give him money and send him on his way. Yes—that would work. He would take the money gratefully and move on, or so she imagined. But it was offhand and cruel, and moreover a waste of an opportunity. It seemed to her that there was something magical in this sudden appearance of another human being; it was surely a sign, as she had thought before. She could bribe someone in the port to take him in. But then she would lose her influence over him, and nor did that seem right. She was the savior and she relished the role. It made her vital in a new way. To save another person: it wasn’t nothing. It wasn’t exactly an achievement, but it was a small shift in the balance of power toward the weak. Such shifts were the substance of one’s moral life—they made the intolerable tolerable. She thought back to what Sam had said that day about atonement, and she realized now that the need for atonement was hers. She was righting the wrongs that she herself had committed, even though rationally speaking the two were not connected. Idiotic, but there it was. She had been haunted by the wronged Turk in Dalston for months, and with time it had begun to fester within her. Whether it was a small failure or a large one was immaterial; a chain reaction had been set in motion by her ineptitude and cowardice, and it would carry on creating havoc out of sight and mind for as long as that person lived. Such things did not end when one lost interest in them. Their consequences continued even if one didn’t have to live with them oneself. Morality was nothing more than paying attention to the chain reaction while not causing another one. She was feeding an unknown man strawberries on the hill outside Episkopi and she was enjoying it. He seemed to be enjoying it as well. He ought to be, she thought with gratification.

  Then, as an entertainment, she brought out another small packet of the weed she had bought from the boat girl, though she wasn’t sure how he would respond to it. But he understood what it was at once and didn’t push it away. Her gifts were a success.

  —

  They went down the path in the direction of the sea and the beach at Nisiza. Sam was more at ease now. She hung back a little and watched the other two from behind. Naomi had told her to bring her swimsuit, so she must have foreseen this detour all along, and under a brilliant sky there was no room for suspicion or smallness of spirit. In a few minutes of walking in the heat they were soon laughing together, in synchronicity, and there was no ambiguous complexity to ruin the moment. It was there, but it could be left behind for a while. The path was difficult to negotiate and it took a long time to come down to the water. She wondered, and not for the first time, if the old men had followed them down or were watching them from somewhere. The path dipped downward in the shade and delivered them to the small church of Agios Ioannis, with the sea just on the far side of the cliffs.

  They sat there against a wall and drank from their water bottles. The beach was by a skerry a few hundred meters away, the promontory uninhabited and encircled by shallow water—a short but prickly hike.

  “You know secret places,” Faoud said to Naomi. “How did you find a place like this?”

  “I used to come here alone as a girl.”

  “Is there anyone on that little island?”

  She shook her head. Sam took off her sunglasses and let the ocean blind her. There were withered olive trees all around them, the earth a pale chocolate color. The wind rushed off the cliffs from the choppy water. She felt now how subtle Naomi had been to bring the
m down here, away from the world. It normalized things. She felt calm, too, in the shade of the sea-beaten church, lonely on its perch and adrift in the centuries. It must be where the people of Episkopi came. They stood up eventually and scrambled down the rough slopes to the small beach that joined the skerry to the land. They stripped to their swimsuits, Faoud in his shorts, and they waded into the cool water until they were up to their chests. Then they kicked off and swam out around the skerry. Sam, swimming more weakly, trailed behind them a little and the wind whipping off the water deafened her. The other two were talking. On the far side of the skerry they got out and sat on the rocks. By the time she joined them they were halfway through some discussion or other. They seemed to be getting on well, and she felt a shiver of jealousy. “Ridiculous,” she corrected herself. She had no right to be jealous of anyone, but it irked her a little that Naomi seemed to have scored a small advantage over her with the stranger. She hauled up beside them and she was gloriously aware of the slight superiority of her body, the way it detained his eye for a moment despite himself. So her power had not ebbed entirely before the magnetism of a rival. Naomi had other advantages, but not that at least. They lay then in silence for a while, soaking up the sun and the saline wind. But Faoud kept his eye warily on the sea. The police have boats and he knows about them, she thought.

  “What if we were all alone here?” she said idly. “Just the three of us. It would be kind of nice, wouldn’t it?”

  “I was thinking that too,” Faoud said. “Fine, but impossible.”

  “Maybe we’d hate each other by the end of the first day,” Naomi said.

  That’s exactly how it would be, Sam thought.

  “What about your parents?” he asked both of them at once.

  “Mine,” Naomi said, “should just go live elsewhere. This island is far too small for them. They overwhelm it. If they left I wouldn’t be sorry. I’d be delirious.”

  He smiled with a timid puzzlement.

  “Are they unpleasant?”

  “They’re who they are. I shouldn’t say anything. Sam here, on the other hand, has nice parents. We might let them stay.”