—
The early ferry to Piraeus passed through a narrow strait separating the mainland from the island of Poros. By Galatas the waters were little more than a canal, and every time she went through it Naomi felt the dread that came from being squeezed into that arid defile. They observed the scene from the deck eating souvlaki sandwiches with mayonnaise, their noses painted with sun cream, and this time she felt no dread whatsoever. They passed Aegina, its calcimine houses shining under a cloudless sky, tidy as shrines. They were happier as soon as Hydra and Poros had disappeared below the horizon and the luminosity was ahead of them and not behind.
Separately, it occurred to both of them that they could make a run for the airport and take their chances. They had their passports with them. But the enticing thought came and went, and once it had gone it would never return. At the port they half ran into the street and stopped a taxi to take them into the city; to the neighborhood of Caravel and a cafe called Oroscopo where Naomi had been going for years. It was a Sunday, and the streets were subdued, though not far away from Oroscopo a clown in dreadlocks performed fire tricks at a traffic light. They had the first drink of the day, two beers, and ordered omelettes. They suddenly felt exultant. Naomi finally opened the bag she had brought with her and showed Sam the silverware. She was going to take it to a shop she knew near the Plaka and sell it off.
“That’s wild,” Sam cried. “So now you’re going full gangsta?”
“I may as well. I don’t want this crap in my house.”
“Won’t they ask where it came from?”
“You forget, I was a foul teenager here. I know all the places. You don’t think it’s my first time selling Phaine’s silver on the sly, do you? She never noticed. She certainly won’t notice now.”
“Her ghost will.”
“Well, her ghost can’t stop me. I don’t believe in ghosts anyway. I’ve already decided I’m going to make some changes in her arrangements.”
“So you’re going to renovate the house?”
“I’ll wait till everything dies down—then yes. I’m going to clear it out and start again. I’m going to paint it all blue inside. It’ll be so much more beautiful. I’ll make it like my mother wanted it to be. She had taste, unlike that bitch. Jimmie had taste, only it was bad taste. I suppose it’s better than having no taste at all.”
At high noon, with the shadows at their most diminished and the streets lit as if by neon, they took a taxi to the Plaka and climbed up to the Acropolis through the slopes of pines, which broke up the heat. At the Propylaea they took some selfies against the steep steps leading up to the Parthenon and suddenly the secret society of two had begun to blossom once more without anyone to inhibit it.
When they got to the Parthenon and into the full sunlight, the view of the islands far off in their haze took their thoughts away, and in response they sat on one of the walls and looked down at the Theatre of Dionysus below it. The walls, more ancient than the temples, with their darker color and weeds, always filled Naomi with memories of her father. Childhood summers, when Jimmie took her here with her mother and they had picnics on the walls. It was her father’s one noble idea: the transmission of the idea of Eternal Greece. But it was a mystery why he had this idea in the first place and why he didn’t act on it in any other part of his life, let alone his insalubrious business dealings. The two elements existed side by side in his character without anyone’s knowing how or why. Perhaps it came from his own childhood, since he had always been an avid reader. And because it came from his own childhood, it had entered hers and had remained with her. Sitting on the wall with Sam and saying nothing was her last farewell to him.
After an hour they went back down to the Areopagus and a fiery view of the city. The rock, unchanged for millennia, the place where Solon and Pericles stood; and the twenty-first-century city, battered almost to death. Tourists streamed back down to main paths, Koreans and Taiwanese, and as dusk fell the site’s solitude reimposed itself. They sat close together without talking as thousands of lights came on, and Sam thought, we could stay here all night, I wouldn’t mind. She was admiring Naomi more, and was almost in awe of her decisiveness, her ability to turn on a dime and improvise for her own benefit. She had not been fazed for more than a few moments, although Sam admitted to herself that there was also something unsettling about this same quality. Quiet and dogged, Naomi had swept onwards like the beautiful criminal she was at heart, unaware of the complexities of conscience.
“We’ll spend the night at the Grande Bretagne,” Naomi said at length, taking her hand for a moment. As if, knowing this city better than anyone who spoke their language, she had the credentials to decide everything two girls might do during a free evening in it. “It’s where we Codringtons always stay. There’ll only be one of us now, but I’ll have a Haldane with me—and that’s far better all round. I think I can pay for it with a candlestick. Maybe two.”
They walked down into the Plaka. Its once-maddening tourist crush had diminished, which was precisely why it had become more quietly desperate. Just beyond it were old boutiques on the verge of extinction and, conversely, pawnshops doing brisk business. Naomi sat Sam in a cafe and made her wait while she sold the silver. It was pointless to involve her in a transaction that might be witnessed. Agreeing this time, Sam waited with her metrios. A half hour later Naomi came back without the bag and with an impressive amount of cash.
“We could fly to Bali with this. Shall we?”
“Let’s!”
Instead they took another taxi to the Grande Bretagne on one side of Syntagma Square and checked in with Naomi’s Greek ID card. The staff knew her well, however, and they asked immediately after Mr. and Mrs. Codrington.
“They’re in Rome,” she said coolly. “Can we have Daddy’s suite? This is my cousin, Samantha.”
“Certainly, Miss Codrington.”
“And bring up a bottle of gin with some Canada Dry.”
They bowed by just moving their heads.
Naomi and Sam went up to the suite and closed the tall windows against the sun. In fifteen minutes the room had cooled down. There were sets of games in the room, and they played Scrabble on the bed all afternoon while drinking the gin and Canada Dry. Sam was the winner.
“I’m going to take you to an amazing restaurant tonight,” Naomi said. “A known Codrington nightspot. But I think, apo ton theo, that you’ve earned an evening there. And so have I.”
“By God, eh?”
They slept for two hours, then dressed. Descending to the haughty lobby, they asked for a taxi to go to Kolonaki, where they were let off at a quiet corner with no crowds and from where they sauntered up a small street to a place called Spondi. Jimmie and Phaine knew the owners well, and there were unassuming outer walls to protect them. They came in and the waiters looked happier than usual to see them. They were accustomed to uttering cries of “Mister Jimmie!” and displaying a dramatic courtesy toward the Greek woman, Phaine, whose father they had known in the days of Costas Simitis. For it was Phaine’s Athenian family who enjoyed gravity here.
They were shown to Mister Jimmie’s usual table.
“Just bring us something delicious,” Naomi said to them in Greek. “My cousin has never eaten here before. I want you to show her what you can do.”
They were still tipsy from the afternoon’s gin, and Sam was the tipsier of the two.
“My parents never take me anywhere like this,” she said. “Is this for real?” She examined the gold rims on the plates.
It was clear that the waiters had known Naomi since she was a little girl. They brought out a Ktima Chardonnay from Pendeli, Mister Jimmie’s favorite juice. The food came when they were halfway through the bottle: “Parmesan” with girolles, puff pastry with Brillat-Savarin, and then a plate of olive oil from Hania. The waiter at their table told them that there was once a cult of Dionysus at Pendeli. The waiters always told the same story when they ordered the Ktima. Ancient wine, then, ancient apart from th
e Chardonnay, that is. They took a second bottle of it.
“Did you really come here when you were a kid?” Sam asked.
“My parents used to bring me here to civilize me, I think. It was much nicer back then—the city, I mean. Everything. We can come here every week if you like.”
“I wish we could live at the Grande Bretagne for the rest of the summer. I’m sick of the island.”
“It’ll be all right. I have some news. The English guy is leaving for Italy. He got a call from his office—”
“He’s leaving?”
Naomi lowered her voice and leaned in.
“The credit card was used over there. It means Jimmie and Phaine are still alive and kicking. Isn’t that wild?”
“So there are ghosts after all.”
“There are. And they like buying expensive things. Apparently, it was a pair of shoes.”
“Sick.”
“He’s leaving today, I think.”
“But what will he find over there?”
“I don’t have the faintest idea. I guess he’ll hunt down Faoud and not find him. I hope Faoud has the sense to ditch the car and disappear. They’ll put out a search on the number plates.”
“But what if they catch him?”
“Then we’re in the chocolate, as the French say. Dans le chocolat.”
“In the shit?”
“Way in it. But they won’t find him. I wouldn’t have done it if I thought he was stupid. He’s not stupid.”
“He may not be stupid, but he might get greedy.”
“I don’t think he’ll be stupid enough to be greedy,” Naomi said with a degree of finality. “Let’s have the chocolate parfait, shall we? It’s more important than worrying about an English bloodhound. We’re going to be safe.”
The parfait came with a mango sorbet and they had a serving of Spondi’s specialty coffee from Giovanni Erbisti in Verona. They went afterward into the garden to drink their digestifs, sit under the trees, and talk. Sam noticed that Naomi had already found her groove after the death of her father and stepmother. She was mapping out her next phase of life with a formidable composure. It was, now that the younger woman saw it up close, quite unsettling and unnatural in some way. At first she had thought it was high spirits, or else discipline, an ability to overcome grief. But suddenly in the garden of Spondi she began to think that it was something else altogether. The way Naomi had stepped quietly from one life into another revealed a certain degree of premeditation. Naomi, she thought, had been thinking about this liberation for years, and when it had come—albeit accidentally and unexpectedly—she had opened the door offered and walked through it without hesitation. But also without fuss. It was as if she had planned everything down to the last detail and was therefore unsurprised when things did not fail to go according to plan. Imperturbably cold and clairvoyant. She was maybe much more like her father than either of them had ever been able to admit.
When they were finally back in the suite upstairs at the Grande Bretagne, Sam opened the windows and glanced down at Syntagma Square and the parliament opposite it. She suddenly wanted to be alone for a few minutes. A few anarchists, a few fires in drums, and by the steps leading up to the parliament a line of soldiers standing under the lamps, an insufficient line to hold a riot. She turned and saw Naomi already between the sheets in her T-shirt. They smiled at each other, and the older girl blew a strand of hair out of her own face and said, “There’s going to be a very silly revolution tomorrow.”
Sam came to the bed and sat at its far end, uncertain where she was going to lay her head. Things were not quite clear between them yet. The earlier conversation had not been laid to rest entirely, and Sam still felt that she harbored within herself the wariness of the hunted.
“It would be better,” she said.
“It would, wouldn’t it? It’s always better to get it over and done with.”
“Naomi, do you think—” she paused—“is it possible that Faoud killed your father and stepmother on purpose?”
Naomi took this in her stride, with her usual nonchalance.
“Anything’s possible.”
“That’s what I thought. Pretty much anything.”
“And what if he did? What does that change?”
“Nothing.”
‘That’s right. When I was small my father had a horrible toast. He used to say, when he lifted his glass and touched yours, ‘Here’s to killing marmots.’ I never knew what it meant, but now I think I do.”
“I don’t understand that at all,” Sam said.
“It’s a British thing, I guess. But as I said, I didn’t understand it either. It just made me laugh.”
“But why?” Sam said earnestly. “You mean the world is violent anyway?”
“Maybe.”
Naomi reached out and touched Sam’s cheek with the back of her hand, then keeled over slowly until she was lying next to her.
“But not us.”
“What are we, then?”
“We’re the noble ones. We’re undoing the violence of others.”
Sam’s eyes were wide open, and she stared straight up at the ceiling where shadows merged. A part of her mind had split off.
“What have we undone, then? We’re profiting from it.”
“That’s just an accident.”
Naomi blew the strands of hair out of Sam’s face now.
“One has to learn how to improvise. It’s all a war, in the end. It’s a war we have to win.”
“Did we win yet?”
“Not yet. But we will.”
We’re drunk, Sam thought, and just babbling.
Nevertheless, it could be said that she had won something. She had won her independence.
“I feel like a bank robber,” she said weakly, her eyes finally closing. “Running and running. But sort of happy.”
“It’s the running that’s fun.”
“But I have to go back to New York. Then I don’t know.”
Naomi turned on her back as well and she smiled, almost to the point of breaking into laughter. The kite-flyer almost losing control, but remembering at the last moment that her kite had to remain airborne at all costs.
She had hardly slept from then on, though the revolution didn’t come that night or even during the following morning. When they were taking their mute breakfast together at their window the city below them refused to throw a single insurrectionary sound their way. It was only the seabirds prowling a wide summer-vacation blue sky who projected their cries downward while the protestors of the night before appeared to have gone to sleep in the middle of the revolt. Everything was therefore quiet. Sunlight lay on a pot of hotel jam and the girl’s long fingers picking at things with a delicate indecision: Naomi shaded her eyes with one hand to look at her, admiring once again the undiminished fineness that she had relished the first minute she had set eyes on her at the beach at Mandraki. Sam was nearing the end of a long and fruitful innocence. But was it really a war they were in now, or had they already won it?
NINETEEN
Near Lake Bolseno, as the sun fell behind cypresses that made him think of Hajez, Faoud passed through a place called Valentano and then onto a road that made its way alongside the waters past little camping grounds and shuttered stalls with the word Fragola written across them. Beyond the lake another road rose steeply along the edge of a colossal ravine as it approached Sorano, a place that he was sure was inhabited only by the old. When he got there at ten the piazza was already empty and that suspicion was confirmed. The village was a honeycomb of caves and abandoned houses clinging to a great spur of rock, and when he got out for a few minutes to test the air and to regain his sense of place he heard at once the birds that gave Sorano most of its nocturnal life.
Close to the entrance of the old town a terrace hung above the ravine that could be half-seen by the glare of the piazza lamps. Water churned along the bottom, and he could see the mouths of caves where the Etruscans had once buried their dead. For a moment,
leaning against the rail, he was compelled to remember Aleppo before the ruin. The impeccable city where he had studied years earlier at the music school of Frenchman Julian Weiss, master of the qanan. The nostalgia came out of nothing but the sepulchral abandonment of Sorano at a late hour. Houses carved out of the rock, thousands of years compressed into simple walls and arches and secret doors. But the Syrian stones he would never see again.
Sovana, by contrast, lay at the bottom of a road that descended into an archaeological site. The road crossed a river and near to the waters lay the Codrington house, accessed not by a normal driveway but by a dirt track that wound its way through an orchard of quince trees. He left the car on the far side of the orchard, locking it and taking his bag. A footpath led to a tall iron gate that had to be unlocked. He had various keys from the car, and in the darkness he fumbled with one key after another until one turned and the gate opened. The house was low and very long, like an enormous stable, though it had two stories. Before it lay a bedraggled garden with pieces of statuary and a well. He went to the front door and negotiated the three locks one by one until he was able to push it open and walk into a hallway of flagstones, beams, and austere open stonework. Groping for the light switch, he turned on the overhead lamp and found himself in a restored convent with long white corridors and lines of cell doors. Parchment maps in frames hung on the walls, time-darkened religious paintings and strange wooden ladles, the instruments of forgotten nuns.
Beautiful Animals Page 18
