by Tobias Hill
At the bottom was a name, precise as a cemetery engraving, and so small on the translucent paper it made his eyes ache to read it.
Matsumoto Natsuko
Sparta,
February 2004.
He was still bent over the plan when the door beside him opened, almost spilling him out, the wind tugging at the Permatrace, Missy leaning in.
–Boy, you look sketchy. You just had to go and be Jason’s size.
Her mouth was set hard in distaste. He got a hold on the wayward map and began to apologise even as she overrode him.
–No, it’s okay, you’ll fit right in. Don’t mind me. How are you feeling?
–A lot better, thanks.
–Good for you. Can I squeeze in there?
She was trying before he could reply. Up close everything about her seemed excessive; her voice, her Yankee health, the wide bones of her face in the freckled shade of the straw hat.
–Ben, I just found out about the message. I am so so sorry. What you must think of us I don’t know. What happened was that Natsuko was supposed to leave it for you at the desk because she goes for a swim at your hotel every morning, but she felt sick and didn’t go today and…well, she just forgot. It’s not like her at all. She’s really so apologetic and actually ashamed. I think she’s so sorry she can’t even tell you sorry yet, you know?
There was a faint smear of suntan lotion on her nose, a line she had missed. She was so close he could smell it: salt coconut. He resisted the urge to rub it in.
–Anyway, how’s the hotel? Settling in? Cyriac knows how to look after its hardware. Speaking of which, I can’t believe you tried to walk. That wasn’t real smart. How did you even know we were up here? Listen, okay, in future, you really don’t want to mess with the weather here. You want to show it some respect. This is the country that invented the thunderbolt, okay? It must have been a heck of a walk! When it gets like that we just dive for cover, we’re out of here like prairie dogs; oh, we just hole up in the huts or the chapel, and we, you know, we just play strip poker, drive each other crazy up here. I mean we do that anyway. Not the poker, actually, I’m kidding…wait, you’re not religious too, are you? Oh thank God. Me, you dump me on a bare hilltop in March and I’ll trade my soul for a dry butt any day…I’m talking too much, aren’t I? I know I talk too much.
He was laughing, and she blushed before laughing back at him.
–Well I’m glad you find me amusing. Okay, how about introductions? No, you stay put, I can pick out the wildlife from here…So there’s Jason, who you’ve met, and Eberhard you know, right? Jason is annoying as hell but he really knows what he’s doing, he’s been shovelling a long time, the day he was born he turned round and dug right on back in, you know what I’m saying? And Eberhard is kind of hard work too, but I guess you know that. Then that fine figure of a man with his head in the ground, that’s Max, that’s just a nickname but he likes it, we all kind of do whatever Max says…he’s bossy that way. Max is our magician. He sees colours like nobody I’ve ever worked with. You show him dirt, he’ll show you pay-dirt, I swear it’s like he’s got X-ray vision, we’d never have found the Skull Room without him…and there’s Natsuko, she’s our illustrator, she’s nice but she’s a–what do you English say? A funny old bird? And Miss World there, that’s Eleschen. Our finds specialist. Then we have our dear locals, Chrystos and Giorgios, whose family actually owned this land way back, and that’s Themeus, and his cousin Elias will be underground…and that’s it. Except for me. Dr Missy Stanton, but like I said just call me Missy. And here you are and none the worse for wear. So welcome to my palace!
–Your what?
His voice sounded weak in his own ears. Her exuberance was boxing him into a role, a sympathetic uncertainty. He felt frail again beside her, insipidly English. She spread her arms, filling the car; palms up, like an oil tycoon or a televangelist. Praise be!
–Therapne! Actually it’s supposed to be the palace of Helen and Menelaus, but they’re ancient history and I’m project director, so I reckon that makes me the Daddy. Bow down before Queen Missy of Sparta! Listen, Ben, I’m so glad you’re here. We really needed a new face, things were kind of weirding out recently. And you’re going to love it. I mean will you look at it? And it’s even more beautiful underground. I promise you could spend your whole life digging here and never get tired of it, and what is that if it isn’t love?
She was unpacking a bag now, heaping things in his lap, still chattering on.
–Did you have lunch? I stole you a little smorgasbord. Here we have coffee in case Jason’s tea is too nasty, which it probably is, and this is bread and this is cheese…and this is bug dope, don’t eat that; and these are the famous Greek Bread Rusks, have you had these? Oh. My. God. You know they dug some of them up, seventeenth-century site, and they could still eat them? I mean I don’t know if they did, well I guess they must have, otherwise how would they know? Anyway, that’s what these things taste like, four-hundred-year-old bread. Edible is relative. Don’t say I didn’t warn you. Eberhard likes them. Personally I’d rather eat bug dope.
He picked a Jack Daniel’s bottle out of the pile and held it to the window light.
–Moonshine. Reckoned you could use a shot. Chrystos makes it himself. Go easy or we’ll be digging your brain out of the upholstery.
He unscrewed the bottle and sipped carefully. Immediately the reek of aniseed filled his mouth, the fumes searing his sinuses. His throat clenched and he doubled up, coughing, felt the bottle pulled from his hands, heard a snort of disdain and the sound of the bottle being swigged, and looked up in time to see Missy wiping her mouth.
–You’ll get used to it. Let’s get some food down you at least. You eat, I’ll talk, it’s what I do best. Did that Fischer woman tell you what we’re doing here?
–Not really–
–Not that she understands, or she would’ve funded us. Ben, what we’re doing here is really important. See, no one understands any of this. Is the North Hill Mansion really the palace of Menelaus? If we dig under the shrine are we going to find Helen of Troy? The skull that launched a thousand ships? Let alone Classical Sparta, no one understands that at all. Digging for Sparta is like trying to squeeze blood out of a stone…Fischer would say so anyway, those old-school guys are all doom and gloom, but they don’t know how hard we’re going to squeeze, they don’t know we’re going to juice these stones. So right now we’re looking for secondary findspots at the peripheries of the main sites. That means here and the Sanctuary of Artemis-Orthia this season, and the acropolis and Amyclai when I find someone to grease my palm again. We’re working a long season to do that much this year, nine months through October. Long hours, six days a week, but every find makes it worth it. So, ready to get juicing?
–Now?
–Of course now, now you’re feeling better. Look, I called the doc and she said get you warm and rested and you’d probably be fine, so we have and you are. Probably. And there’s nothing like work for keeping warm, is there? What are you good for? You’re Oxford, right? Arch-Anth?
–Class-Arch, he said, his eyes still watering from the moonshine, and Missy wrinkled her striped nose, as if his education were something to be ashamed of. –I have dug before. I can also catalogue–
–Yeah, well, it’s a funny thing, but everyone wants to catalogue. That’s the icing on the cake, my friend, the extreme cream. What else?
–I can draw.
–Can you dig?
–Of course I can dig.
–My hero, Missy said, and leaned in to kiss him on the cheek, the taste of aniseed still on her breath. –Like I said, you’re going to fit right in. So, are you ready to go make holes?
She held open the door for him like a gentleman. He stepped back into the wind, glad for Jason’s two layers. Somewhere a radio was tuned to a Greek station, but turned down low: over it he could hear skylarks dwindling in the clear air.
–Boots, Missy said decisively, and took his arm, steering hi
m towards the Transit van. He sat on the mudguard to fit them, watching the others as Missy rambled on. The group had spread out now, only the Greeks working together in pairs, and only the wrestler–Max?–seeming to notice him, looking up from the lip of the hole at which he sat, his expression neither friendly nor inimical. He saw a muscle flex in the man’s flat cheek, like something parasitical.
–…Just light housework today, Missy was saying, one hand holding her hair out of her face. No point beating a dead dog. So I’ll give you the grand tour tomorrow, but what you see is what you get. We’ve struck gold twice around North Hill and the same below the Shrine. Skull Room’s the really interesting context, but I think maybe we’ll leave that to Max, he gets prickly about me interfering…let’s put you on Long Hearth. Aren’t you done yet? What’s the problem, you got two left feet? Come on.
As it turned out the tour would not wait. Once she had started showing off the site Missy wouldn’t stop. He trudged behind her, nodding to those whose work they disturbed, nodding again at Missy’s explanations, one thing leading remorselessly to the next, the beauty of the site lost in its details.
Eberhard’s lie had been thorough: there were excavations everywhere. Circling each rise were minefields of test holes no wider than a hand’s breadth, burrows where the magnetometer had picked up a signal only for the spade to turn up a petrol can or a bale of rusted wire. Work was continuing on six pits, two that were still no more than clean pegged-out earth, four that already went deeper. He stood at Missy’s shoulder, hunched against the wind, as she went through the potsherds laid out by the Findhut, a broken kantharos inside as massive and pale as a horse’s skull.
–And here’s two Spartans we discovered with the hearts still beating! Hey, guys. Chrystos, this is Ben, he’s yours for the afternoon. Go easy on him, he’s still fragile, okay?
For the last few hours of that first afternoon it was Long Hearth he worked on, with the Maxis brothers. The Greeks dug at the pit floor, Chrystos with a trench shovel to the south, Giorgios to the north with brush and trowel. Each bucket of earth that was cleared was passed up to be sifted through quarter-inch hardware cloth. At first the loads weighed nothing at all. Only slowly did the ache in the muscles set in.
Chrystos put him to sifting. He did not know enough to be grateful for that. He sat on the goat-cropped grass, unduly annoyed by the damp, the chill of the walk still in his bones, peering at the men below. Max’s Skull Room was the widest hole, and even the shallowest terrace of East Midden was deeper, but Long Hearth was the biggest, lean and dark, widening to the north like a cyclopean keyhole. Four feet down at that end the sandy topsoil and underlying clay had given way to a gigantic circle of hearthstones, but to the south there was nothing at that depth, and below it only layers and layers of ancient ash, a black record of repeated cataclysm at two feet, four feet, five.
The brothers spoke little between themselves and less to him. He sat listening to their coughs and sudden sighing breaths as they worked. The panting in the dusty air. Once Giorgios waved him down to hold a torch while he brushed at an imploded nest of broken pottery. The heat took him by surprise. The rain had been cold, and the ground of the hillside was still hard from winter, but the pit itself was humid enough to make them sweat. The last sun angling across the muddy lip, their work warming the trapped March air.
They kept on until the light began to go, breaking camp at six. It wasn’t until then that either of the Greeks did more than mutter an order to him. Chrystos was the first to offer his hand. His grip was hard and cool as bone, his face caked with dust, ingrained with it, as if Missy had not been joking; as if he had just been dug from the ground himself.
–Welcome, he said, solemn and grim, and somewhere in the dusk the bells of the goats set off ringing.
The brothers drove him to town, the van leading the other cars back down the umbrella-seller’s road. As far as he could tell they had found nothing for all their work on Long Hearth but the nest of pottery and another stratum of ash, but neither of the Greeks seemed dispirited. Aside from an offer to pick him up in the morning, what talk there was passed between them as if he was not there. Even so, invisible among half-strangers, he felt content.
More than that. As they turned down under the streetlamps of Palaeológou Street he felt gripped by an inexplicable excitement. Only days later did he understand it as a feeling of arrival. Of knowing that he had not gone wrong after all. That his weeks in Athens had not been for nothing. That he had finally arrived somewhere he might belong.
It was a clear night, the clouds rained out to nothing. After Chrystos dropped him he loitered on the hotel steps, reluctant despite everything to call an end to the day, his wet clothes a malodorous bundle under one arm, the lobby spilling light above him.
There were constellations rising over the black of the mountains, abstract and familiar configurations, superstrings of stars. He was still trying to remember their names when a car horn sounded behind him, and turning, his heart sinking, he saw Missy there, waving, working at the window.
–Hey!
–Hey.
–Want to go for a bite? I guess you’re too tired, but here I am asking anyway…
–I am pretty tired, he said, and regretted it even as her grin faded.
–Just an idea. She shrugged. Then; I could do with the company.
–What about the others?
–The others. Are you kidding?
She looked younger now: she was not much older than he was himself. It was as if the excavation endowed her with some seniority that she had left behind, up among the pits and ruins. Her eyes were dark in the gloom of the car. Stripped of ebullience, her voice was soft and serious.
–I don’t really hang out with the others.
–Oh. Well, if you don’t mind waiting, I’ll just–
–Listen, forget it, bad idea. I don’t know what I was thinking, you must be bone-tired–
–No, I’ll come.
Her smile broke through again. –Sure?
–I’d like to.
–Great! Get in, cowboy.
He jogged round to the passenger door. The car was already moving as he ducked inside, the door swinging shut as Missy accelerated into the evening traffic. She drove fast and not well, the SUV deceptive in its solidity, an armour of steel and glass between them and the lights they hedged, the trucks they overtook, Missy’s hand raised to each in lazy apology.
–Where are we going?
–Wherever the eating looks good. Got to keep your strength up.
–I’ll have to get it back first.
–Poor Ben. It’ll get easier. If you take care of yourself it will. Turning up in the rain like that, that’s no one’s fault but yours. I swear I’ve got dogs back home with more sense…wait, maybe here! Let’s see! I promise it’ll beat room service.
They tried four places before Missy was satisfied. It was early to eat, the tavernas were still closed for Lent or until the summer, and the hotels were too rich for their pockets. There were cheaper places around the town square, grills more ramshackle than the one in Metamorphosis, a few cafés and ouzeries. In some the talk would stop as they entered and the food would be brought out with reluctance for inspection. In the one Missy settled on she was met with welcomes from the old men, and Ben with questions in Greek and German–Where are you from? What is your name?–then with drinks sent over, the farmers and factory workers slapping the tables and whistling for fresh wine, the stereo bellowing music, the TV broadcasting bombings and election rallies.
By the time the food came he was ravenous. He let Missy’s conversation wash over him, the food and the talk rough and strange and his mind on other things half the time. The ancient city he had fallen in love with as a child. The streets below the streets below his feet, buried like old writing on a palimpsest.
On the television people ran towards what might have been bodies or bundles of clothes. Three men in a row stood facing a burned-out car, as if it too were a body:
but beside him Missy was still talking, ruddy, laughing, telling tall stories. The dry desert light of Abu Simbel, the marbled rock tombs of Petra. The grandeur of Ephesus, the shafts of Troy, the whispering galleries of Ebla and Ur. And the wine as pink as cochineal, the lamb baked with laurel, the pork roasted with juniper.
He slept well that night. He did not recall dreaming. Only just before morning, as he woke, did he find himself lying in the dark, thinking of Metamorphosis. The cacophony of the meat grill, the alarums of metal and the hotchpotch of languages. Then Eberhard’s voice, cool and sure, echoing afterwards as he washed and dressed and went down to the dark street.
–I’m afraid no one calls it Lacedaemonia any more. Not even us.
–Us?
–Those of us who are working there.
His hands on the table, the fingers interleaved, sheltering.
In the mornings he would wash quickly, then boil up the kettle and take the one chair to sit by the window. He would be there before six, but already then Sparta would be awake, the fields and factories waiting for no one.
He would drink his tea and watch the town come to life. The sunrise would be somewhere behind him. It would creep down the Taygetos mountains. Sometimes the first light was clear of all colours except those of the snow and stone of the mountains. Other mornings it was red as blood.
Just after six the slicked-back boy would steal out into the yard, roll back the cover on the pool, then loiter, smoking a fretful cigarette behind the stacked-up sun loungers until Natsuko appeared.
Seeing her before Ben could, the boy would flinch galvanically, then get to work, wiping down chairs, sweeping the tiles as she swam. From Ben’s window she looked foreshortened when she first came out–small as a child in the yard’s dim light–and then elongated as she dived, splash and ripple transforming her, her fierce, neat strokes eating up the pool, echoing up the courtyard’s well. And him and the boy both watching her. White towel, black suit, white skin, black hair.
