by Tobias Hill
So many lengths. He always lost count. She was still swimming every morning when he left himself.
Two apartment blocks overlooked the pool. In a way he knew well from home he came to recognise the strangers who lived in them. The workers who trudged home at first light from the cannery or the vulcanisation plant; the man who hung cagebirds on his balcony; the old women who dried octopus on her washing line; the working women who put out clothes at dawn to have them done by lunchtime. Emine, he knew, would have liked them.
Further off stood a heavy low-rise, scores of windows in acres of concrete. It did not look like a building in which people would live, but neither did it look like a regular workplace. Its ordinary mystery became a fixture of his mornings. For the first few days he was too exhausted to do much more than eat when he came home from the dig, alone or with Missy, and he would forget about the low-rise until he woke and saw it there again. The lights would go out in one window and come on in another, silent and inexplicably purposeful, like warnings on a strange machine.
On his fourth morning he saw a figure moving in one of the building’s lit windows. He followed it with his gaze as it came and went and came again. Only when it stopped moving did he recognise the uniform of a nurse. For a moment she stood profiled, tranquil at that distance. He couldn’t see what ordeal or task she was attending to. Her head was bent. Merciful, like that of an icon.
He would wait on the hotel steps. At half-six Chrystos would come for him, every day as he had promised, always on time, always with his brother Giorgios, never with more than a nod to Ben’s thanks, never with any of the others. The van could have held them all, but that wasn’t the way things worked. The foreigners and the other locals made their own journeys, together or alone, according to a chemistry that Ben could not understand.
Missy was there first each day, setting up camp in her Gore-tex hoodie, her SUV parked messily in the shelter of the cypresses. Max came in Eberhard’s silver Volvo 144 Delux, Jason and Eleschen later in Natsuko’s hatchback, and Elias and Themeus last and by foot or perched double on a scooter. Sometimes Chrystos would pick up other people, an uncle and a teenage in-law who would get down at the village of Afisou, an older Maxis cousin with an antiquated shotgun and false teeth of the same vintage, and once with the uncle an old, old creature whose accent was almost incomprehensible to Ben, a tiny woman with oiled hair who nagged at Giorgios all the way, her cracked voice jabbing at him over some undefined and antediluvian grievance, implacable despite Giorgios’s silence and the uncle’s soothing remonstrances, staring at them all with relentless bird-black eyes.
He grew fond of Chrystos and wary of Giorgios. In Chrystos there was a dignity which in his brother became forbidding. Outdoor lives and reticence made both seem old, not that either was young. Chrystos had some English from his stints on other excavations and his years as a merchant seaman, and photos in his wallet of Newcastle England and Newcastle Australia, wrinkled shots of old sunsets and friends. But he was a quiet man and Giorgios quieter, his talk to the point and his points sharp.
If they talked at all on the way up it was sparingly, their three voices hushed, as if it were a sin to speak in the dark.
–You slept well?
–Thanks. And for the lift, again.
A nod. Chrystos’s eyes still measuring the road.
–You never take the others?
The bridge out of town, the turning up to Afisou, and then–They make their own ways.
A sound from Giorgios in the back. –They don’t mix with the likes of us.
–Us?
No answer at all to that. He tried again. –What about Elias and Themeus?
Chrystos harrumphed. –They are different again.
–Oh?
Afisou behind them. The roadside shrine under the pines. Claymore and Kleenex. The turning ahead.
–They live outside town. In their own place. It’s not so far for them to walk. They prefer to take care of themselves.
–By the river, Giorgios said. Always they live by the rivers. Those people.
–What people?
–They don’t trust the pipes. They don’t like to drink from the pipes.
–Athigani.
–Athigani?
–Yifti, Giorgios said, and he understood, a first small equation coming clear. Yifti. Gypsies.
That first week he worked with the brothers every day. The others were never far off–the Skull Room, Max’s prize domain, was just over the shoulder of the hill–but the pits kept them apart as they worked, or at least abetted their apartness. At lunch Missy would bring them together to discuss their finds and plan ahead, but they would dissemble after that, Eberhard drifting off to eat alone or sometimes going with Max and Jason to North Hill, Natsuko and Eleschen with them or some days cloistered together under the striped awnings, Elias and Themeus side by side by the shrine with their radio playing softly and homemade pastries on newspapers on their knees. Only Missy seemed to go where she liked, hunkering down to eat with Ben and the others at Long Hearth, or shoving up beside Elias and Themeus, or drawing up a director’s chair beside the girls, her voice carrying as she butted in.
He watched Eberhard. Since he had arrived Sauer hadn’t spoken to him. He wondered about that and what it might mean in the scheme of things. He wondered how it was that he had been with Eberhard at Oxford, had been in the same room as him for so many hours, and yet knew so little of him.
He recalled only two things about Sauer, two things in particular, each memorable because curious. Once, in his first year, he had been at the Institute, late for a lecture, and had ended up on the wrong floor. He had taken the stairs and had heard people talking below him. The stairwell had distorted the conversation, and he had seen Professor Foyt and Professor Lorne from above before he had recognised their voices.
Sauer? Lorne had asked. Is he all they say?
To which Foyt had coughed up a rare dry laugh. For better and worse, I’m afraid. Still, that one is peerless.
Another time, cycling home on Emine’s bicycle, he had heard someone singing in the dark where the Oxford Canal ran between newbuilds, the voice very drunk but striking and sad, the song something old-worldly and German; and coming up beside the figure had seen it was Eberhard, alone, a tie loose on him, dress collar undone, singing as he walked. Afraid of being recognised he hadn’t slowed down, but as he’d passed he’d been unavoidably aware that the other boy was crying.
He watched him. There was a distance between them, but there was a distance between Eberhard and everyone. Then he began to overhear things, a word or a look here and there, and to notice how the others tried to speak to him and were cut short, and he understood that this particular distance was new. That it was his doing.
They were not so different, he thought. Eberhard was not like Emine, who forgave and forgot. His anger lingered, like Ben’s own. They were alike in that.
All that first week he waited for Sauer to say something. Every day he braced himself. He imagined the words and the method of delivery, the question or statement, spoken softly enough to hide malice, or loudly enough for them all to hear.
So you decided to follow me.
I’m sorry you thought you were invited.
Why is it that you followed me?
What are you doing here?
By the end of the week he understood that that wasn’t the way it would happen. Eberhard had chosen to say nothing. He would go on avoiding him, and his avoidance would speak volumes. He would leave Ben unacknowledged, would go on not quite meeting his eyes, would go on looking through him as if he were the fog going out to the rivers.
He knew, of course, that he was not befriended by the others. That too did not need to be said. He had understood it instinctively the day he had arrived. He was not one of them. It was nothing new to him. It was how things had often stood with his older siblings, and after his childhood illness in many places, at school and in the odd jobs he had done before college. It was how som
e of Emine’s wealthy friends had looked or not looked at him. He had stood at the peripheries of many circles, not quite accepted, half-admitted, the friend-of-a-friend, the last-minute dinner guest. He had never liked it, but he had never been surprised by it. It was the way things worked, the way things were. He had never had the wit or the poise, the sureness or the knowingness, the right words or the right manner. He had never had enough to be one of Us.
He saw that Missy was not one of them either, and that unlike him she didn’t understand. Us were Eberhard and Eleschen, Max and Natsuko and Jason. Missy was different; too eager, too ingenuous. She struggled against their closeness with her relentless enthusiasm and was bewildered when she was rebuffed. Where Eberhard was the most donnish of workers, his director would have done anything to be a student again, one of the crowd. He wondered if he could explain it to her, the otherness of the others, unsure he had the courage to spell out something so brutal. What he recognised implicitly was, to her, an invisible force. He watched as she ate lunch with the girls, leaning towards them with awkward need, as baffled as a moth batting against glass.
The first week made no difference for him. He was no closer to them after six days than he had been after one. Welcome, Jason had said, but he had said it with a wink, Ben recalled, and he saw in the recalling that it had been meant not only as a joke, but as a joke on him.
Even so, despite Eberhard, despite Us, he was happy. He had not come to Sparta with any expectation that Sauer would be pleased to see him. He had come to Sparta for its own sake, and Sparta was a joy to him. All those weeks in Athens he had still been in transit. He had been the speed of light, relative to nothing. Not that Sparta promised him anything more. Not that it was a homecoming. It was not like coming home. It was like finding he had never had a home. It was as if he had found his place in the world.
He still carried his wedding ring. He would try and leave it behind only to find that he had picked it up on his way out, involuntarily slipping it into his coat pocket. Sometimes he would discover himself running it through his fingers in the pocketed dark, like a magic trick he’d bought and never worked out how to use. Or he would realise he was worrying at it, as the old men in the town square did with their strings of beads. And once he looked up from his work with a jolt to find it back on his wedding finger, as if it had uncoiled and crept there of its own accord.
The recollection of Emine began to seem muted by distance. Like a child scratching at a scab he made himself remember her.
The first time he had ever seen her: it was his first month at Oxford, Michaelmas term, and he was late for a lecture. Emine was coming down Beaumont Street with friends. It was bright weather and she was laughing. The group came on towards him together, all of them merry, leaving no room for him on the pavement. He stepped aside into the gutter, and as he did so Emine looked at him.
The gloss of her: that was what hooked him first. The lustre of her, like fresh split coal. The way her eyes lit up when they found him. Her collar was lined with a black fur which, he understood later, was meant to show up her hair. And as she looked at him standing there in the gutter her laughter faded. Not to nothing, but to a smile. Not a warm smile, but a pretty one, the delight in it veiled. As if he were a bargain, but the deal was not yet to be counted on.
Have you found someone else? he had asked, the night everything finally came apart. She had told him that she had made confession and that, her condition being intolerable, it was right for them to separate. She had said that she could no longer love him, and done so patiently, as if she were explaining some commonsensical thing to Nessie: as if it were the most natural thing in the world.
Have you found someone else?
She had shaken her head. Not as if she meant to deny it, but as if it were simply the wrong question. It’s not me, she had said, It’s you.
And he had understood. The worst thing was that she had not needed to explain. He had wanted so passionately to hate Foyt, to blame Foyt for the ruin of his marriage, but he had always known that the other man was no more than a symptom. The cause had been himself. After that night he had never asked her for a reason again. Much better to be kept in the dark, where there were still alternatives.
Ten hours a day, he made holes. He washed shards and hauled gear and sieved earth too, but most of the time it was the holes: it all came down to the holes. He made holes with trench shovels and augurs and corers and spades. He made holes with mattocks and trowels and fine brushes, slowly uncovering bones and urns, removing the earth grain by grain, like a child in a story given the first of three impossible tasks.
He began to dream of Therapne. The sun creeping into the pits. The air hung with dust, the walls trickling down. Chrystos and Giorgios digging beside him.
In the dream they dug until the light had gone, then dug until their shovels broke, the walls no longer trickling dust but something wet and warmish. One by one–Ben always last, seeing it first in their faces–they would understand that the wetness was blood, great tracts of it squeezing out of the stones. And even then they always still dug, even with that understanding, not terrified but triumphant, working at the fractured earth with their broken hafts, their hands even, with their fingers and their teeth.
He called Emine three times that first week, trying their apartment, unwilling to catch Foyt at the house. Twice the answerphone kicked in quickly, as it did when other calls were waiting to be retrieved–Emine had never liked checking them, had treated the backlog as a chore to be left to him. The message had not been changed, either, so that he left his monologues for both Emine and his old self.
It was Saturday when she answered. He was late back from the site and too tired for the restaurants. Instead he bought something from the all-hours shop on the corner (the old lady who ran the place a chain smoker with kohl-black eyes, who always looked–or looked at him–as if she had just then recalled an excellently dirty joke), eating in his room, the TV on, the War against Terror flickering far away. A woman in an orange jumpsuit, three figures standing over her, her expression not frightened but dismayed, as if she had just woken up to find, not that she was about to die, but that she had only slept too long and missed the visit of a favourite friend; and a leaner woman, a politician or general in civilian clothes, reading a statement to a room full of flashbulbs, her voice steady as she goes.
…All individuals in all territories should be aware of the risk of indiscriminate terrorist attacks in public places anywhere in the world. Be vigilant, take sensible precautions. Do not assume…
He showered, half-asleep on his feet in the water. He was in bed, the lights out and the TV killed, when he thought to try Oxford again.
He dialled in the dark. Emine picked up on the first ring.
–Hello?
Her voice was throaty, melodious, as if she had just been laughing. He was jealous instantly.
–Hello…who is it?
–Me. Is Foyt with you?
–Ben? My God, where are you? Why didn’t you ring?
–I am.
–Hold on.
The line deadened. Muffled voices, male and female. He closed his eyes, already weary of her, hanging on.
–Are you still there, Ben?
–Is that him?
–No.
–Someone else, then.
–Don’t be stupid, it’s just a friend. Where have you been? You didn’t call!
–You forgot to check the phone. I wrote to you too, when I got yours. I thought you’d have them by now…Are you alright? How’s Ness?
A sigh, both angry and relieved, distorted by the line.
–She’s better.
–Better than what?
–It wasn’t anything. Just the cold. I told you that. She asks about you all the time–
Good, he thought, or felt. His gratitude was more feeling than thinking.
–And I didn’t know what to say. I was worried about you. Where are you?
–Sparta.
–
Sparta?
Now he was smiling. Weary but grinning in the dark. Triumphant.
–Sparta, you know. Council-house of trickery. Helen and Menelaus–
–I know what Sparta is, Ben! What are you doing there?
–Digging holes. I’ve got some work. There’s an excavation here. It was all in my letter. It’s going well, I think. There’s eleven of us. It’s just spadework but it’s beautiful. Did you know Sparta was beautiful? I don’t know why I never came here before. They’ve put me up in this big old hotel, I think you’d like it…
He waited for her to say something. The line had gone quiet. He closed his eyes and found he could still hear her there, just breathing, listening. There were other sounds beyond her, too. The hiss of heavy traffic, outside in damp Oxford streets.
He shivered, the place he had left behind seeming abruptly much too close. The low grey skies. The cold clear air.
–Ben?
–What?
–Are you alright?
–I’m fine, why?
–You sound strange.
–No I don’t.
–You do. When you talk like that it makes you sound strange. I mean different.
For a second he didn’t answer. He found himself becoming angry with her, as if she were questioning his sense, or faith.
–Ben…
–I’m fine, I told you. I’m different because I’m happy here.
–Oh. Well, then, I’m glad for you.
–You don’t sound it.
–No, I am.
But she wasn’t, he thought. Instead she sounded disappointed. Envious. As if she had been hoping for something other than happiness for him. Or from him.
Only after he hung up, on the cusp of sleep, did he realise he had never mentioned Eberhard.
Sunday surprised him.
–Someone is here for you, Sudoku said, as if the someone were distasteful and the fault were to be laid at Ben’s door. It was after eight and he was still in bed, still half-dreaming of the pit.
