by Tobias Hill
–I am thinking of nothing.
By Thursday all was well with the others, if not with himself.
Jason was back on form, telling anyone who would listen of the summer he’d worked in Astrakhan and dug up seven skeletons, all dressed in rotted sable furs, one with a golden fob watch as round and thick as a halved apple. At the dig sermon Eleschen spoke excitedly about the Skull Room: Max had uncovered a pair of urns two feet below Laco herself: inside them Eleschen had found votives to Apollo and Artemis in their role as the twin gods of disease; and with the lead figurines the residues of what seemed indisputably to be medicines. Honey, opium, ground root of cyclamen, and quantities of powdered cinnabar, the red sulphide of mercury.
Even Max was sanguine, breaking off his relentless work to sit with Themeus and Elias under the eaves of Elijah’s chapel, chatting with them about small things, the sun bathing his pockmarked face and rare stone-Buddha smile.
They broke early despite the good weather, Missy announcing a few hours’ leave for Independence Day, revelling in their temporary approbation. They cruised down with the windows open, Eberhard conceding to put some of Jason’s music on–the best driving compilation (Jason said) that side of Berlin–with Eleschen singing along in snatches, her voice throaty and fine, her arm hugging the car’s warm flank, her fingers opening for the breeze.
They were passing the first outhouses and allotments of Afisou when she stopped singing and sat up.
–Oh, she said, her voice falling, Look. And as they did Eberhard slowed to a crawl, the wind of transit dying around them.
A pickup truck with smoked-glass windows lay parked on the bend of the village road. Someone had hosed down the tyres. Mud still clung to the flatbed’s sides. The driver’s door stood open, a toolbox on the grated step. The front wheel on that side was off, the wet chrome hub a polished shield, the chassis jacked up on concrete slabs.
Hung from the back of the cab was a long thin grey rag. It looked heavy, so that at first he thought it must have been soaked by a clumsy pass of the hose. Only as their car closed with it did Ben see it for what it was.
The jackal had been strung up by the tail. Its hindlegs and forelegs hung down; only one ear jutted up, as if still listening. Its guts had been roughly cleaned out. One long wound ran up to its chin, another down each limb to the claw. The belly flapped empty and wide.
Its head swung clear of the truck’s bed. As they passed it by he saw its eyes, narrowed to slits, and finally the white snarl of the teeth trapped in its perpetual grin.
Silence in the car, stretching like held breath. Traffic was backed up before the main road and it was slow going until they were over the bridge. Then Eleschen leaned forward by Eberhard, her white hands gripping the seat back.
–Should we be worried?
–Not at all.
–But where do you think–
Jason, muttering. –They must have got it last night.
–Jason’s right, Eberhard said. If something were going to happen we ought to have seen the signs by now. We were well placed for that. Besides, the body wouldn’t be displayed, not like that, if anyone had found anything.
–Found? Ben said, They found her, didn’t they? What else is there to find?
No one answered him. They drove up past the hotel, not slowing at Eberhard’s but going on towards the cathedral square. The bunting lights were not yet on, nor were the streets crowded, but people were out in numbers, children and best clothes on display, and everywhere there was an air of festival vitality.
–Time for a drink, Jason said. –Who’s up for it? First round’s on me.
–What would they find? he asked again, but still nobody replied.
–This is an appalling song, Eberhard said phlegmatically, and Jason kissed his teeth.
–I’ve heard the shite you listen to. You wouldn’t know good music even if it blew your bloody eardrums out.
They came out by the square. Two priests passed down the broad cathedral steps, old women clambering up around them, all of them–women, priests–in black, busy and sure as ants. Doves scattered around the car, their wings flashing in the sun.
–My definition of a bad song, Sauer began, and Eleschen cut him off.
–I wish it was summer.
–Why? he asked, still bewildered, but caught up in their relief, infected by their happiness, wanting to understand–wanting that more than anything–and Jason laughed, not unkindly, as Eleschen leaned into him, turning her face to kiss his own.
–Because summer is so beautiful here, Ben. Because we’ll be finished with everything by then. And because I want to hear the cicadas singing.
XII
Notes Towards a Thesis
Last night I heard sirens again. This morning the streets reeked of smoke. Some still clung along the river.
Crossword told me about the fire. She collared me out on the steps where she was watering the road trees. Her face came alive with the pleasure of telling it.
It was the yifti (Crossword said), all of them drunk as Russians to celebrate the festival. The women drink just like the men and none of them have the heads for it. The children are insolent and the women (Crossword said, taking my arm) are worse than the men. They keep knives in their skirts. The fires happen all the time because they love to see things burn, they make so many fires just for the prettiness of it. It was an old building went up, out on the road to Gythion. Not that there would be much to burn, those buildings being so tumbledown, half of them already gutted in one way or another.
Later I talked to Elias. Elias tells it differently. He says it was local men, seven or eight of them, who came down looking for some fun. One girl was hurt. No one was burned. The police and the firemen came. And that is all he says.
Siren. From seiren: binder. The Sirens in the old stories are monsters of the seas and rivers. Ligea and Leucosia are their most ancient names. They are birds with women’s faces, or women with the tails of fish. Their voices are beautiful, so beautiful that they can hurt. Their songs are full of hooks and lures, and with them they fish for men. They are men’s fear of women made flesh. A man who hears the Sirens sing forgets his life; forgets himself. His ship is wrecked and down he goes, or he stands listening, transfixed, and dies of the hunger he has forgotten.
First you will come to the place where the Sirens live, the creatures that seduce men. Those fools who get too close will never leave again. The Sirens who lie in the meadows will charm them with their sweet singing, although the dead lie deep around them.
How did Sirens become sirens? The monster draws us in. The device warns us back. They seem like polar opposites. As if the word that once meant north has twisted round to point at south.
What were the jackals to us? Did they draw us or warn us? They didn’t mean either, of course. They didn’t howl for us.
The voices are what stay with me. The sirens woke me last night and I thought I was hearing ghosts, the jackals sounded so like them. I sat down to write this note when I realised I was listening for them again. Their voices are lodged in my head like hooks. I am enmeshed in memories.
What kind of sirens were the jackals? I think they were both Sirens and sirens. A warning and an allurement.
Easter is coming soon.
Themeus has begun bringing Eleschen gifts. At first he was too shy to offer her things to her face. His own face blushes Indian-dark when he does. Elias laughs and Max looks angry and is, I think, embarrassed for him. Themeus creeps up on her at lunch, as if she is an animal he doesn’t mean to startle (one that might run, or might bite?) and leaves her eggs wrapped in fig leaves and celebrity magazines and last season’s wild honeycomb, its ruined gold-black labyrinths suspended in old olive jars.
Her hair is paler, now there’s sun. My Spartan blonde, Eberhard calls her. Jason says Themeus isn’t her only suitor. Half the town men are half in love with her. The cadets worship her. The older ones loiter in the cathedral square in ones and twos every evening. Come Easter,
Jason says, she’ll be buried in offerings.
Jason told me something about her. He says her family are Amish. She told Jason she can’t go back. Her family won’t eat with her. She left because she loved music. Music is evidence of pride. Pride is a deadly sin. She was nineteen when she went to live alone in a town called Athens.
So Eleschen tells Jason, but Jason doesn’t believe it; he thinks music can’t be it, that it must be something juicier. And so Jason tells me, and who can I believe? Jason is full of stories. Like a historian, he believes only in ulterior motives. But we were drinking when he brought it up, and he is more honest when he’s drunk. It’s the only time he tells me things. And he is the only one of us who ever tells me things at all.
They play strange games, Chrystos said. He was right, but the game isn’t the heart of it. They play at being Spartans with their secrets and their ridiculous thefts and hunts. They are like cats practising kills. They are like children, whose games are cruel and facile or meaningless to anyone except themselves. But the game is…something like a joke told to avoid telling the truth. It is a comedy mask. There is more to it than play. Eberhard had no need to lie. It isn’t just a game.
They hide things. They work at it. They’re not much alike except in that. If fear is the theme of the Spartan gods then theirs is secrecy. What am I saying, then? That they have something to hide. That I think they are testing me. That I think they have something up there, something in the caves.
XIII
The Cave
–An outing!
Friday: Eberhard’s. He was in the kitchen for ice. The others were all out on the balcony, pacing their drinking as the moon came up. He could hear them out there, their voices faint through the dead blades of the extractor fan.
Warm gin, Natsuko had said, making a moue of distaste, and before he could offer himself Eleschen had spoken for him. There’s ice. Ben will get it for you, won’t you, Ben?
Eleschen was talking again now, her excitement punctuated by the crack of nutshells. She was chain-eating almonds, the only edible supplies they had found in Eberhard’s kitchen. Before she finished one she was on to the next, cracking them on the butcher’s slab table, her empty shot glass like a gunshot. He knelt to open the freezer and heard pigeons scattering from the eaves overhead.
Eavesdrop: Natsuko’s favourite English word. It made her think of rain, she said. She said she had always loved rain.
In Japan it rains very much.
A lot, you mean. England too. Cats and dogs.
Why cats and dogs?
You could come. I’ll show you.
Maybe, she had said, One day, and she had sounded so nostalgic and melancholy, had made it sound so impossible, as if England were cut off from them by centuries or outer space, that he had burst out laughing.
Crack!
–Will you stop that, El? I can’t hear myself think.
–That’s no great loss. What outing, Eleschen?
–I don’t know yet, I just thought of it, but isn’t it a sweet idea? I think we should go.
–Go where?
–Who cares! Somewhere nice.
–Have we earned it?
–Sure we have. Come on, guys, don’t be so stuffy.
–We haven’t achieved anything yet.
–All the more reason, then. It’ll inspire us. We’ll go somewhere inspiring.
–How could we be anywhere more inspiring than here?
He closed the freezer and went to the sink, the ice fracturing when he ran the water, the voices briefly incoherent, though he knew them well enough to tell them apart without discerning a word, knew them like old friends, would have known them anywhere.
Eleschen was laughing when he shut off the tap.
–We could go tonight even!
–It’s too late, and we’re all too drunk.
–I’m not. I’ll drive. Who’s coming?
Crack!
–Will you bloody stop doing that?
–Only if you find me something else to eat. Which you won’t, because you’re not gentleman enough to help a girl out, and anyway you can’t because Eberhard lives on books and dust. Like a spider. Like a bug.
–I don’t suppose I can be both, since spiders live on bugs–
–You can eat me, darling.
–No, you’re too vulgar. Anyway, these are much nicer.
–I’m nice. You won’t know till you’ve tried.
–Where?
Max’s voice. Ben had almost forgotten he was out there. It was a talent of his, that unobtrusiveness. Notice slipped away from the Georgian like oil from water. It was an odd trait in a big man. His face–Ben imagined it–would be as grudging as his voice.
–Olympia. Or the sea! We haven’t been since Gythion, and it was so cold then. Come on, we’ve got a whole weekend. It isn’t far.
The whole weekend was Missy’s doing. The mood up at the dig had changed for the better that morning, the coolness thawing to a new cordiality. Missy had seemed bemused, and then inordinately pleased, her pride unfathomable until she buttonholed Ben, asking him if the afternoon off she’d declared yesterday had really been so special to them.
She had saved her trump card until the afternoon, announcing just as they struck camp that tomorrow she would have to go to Athens to give her progress report to the Cyriac Foundation. While she was gone they deserved a full day’s holiday. Because you’ve all been such great sports, she had said, and Ben had blushed at the bribery as she blushed at it herself.
He shucked ice into the green-glazed jug. The last cube clung to his fingers, and he hissed and peeled it away, no longer eavesdropping, already tired of it, wanting to be back with them.
–Better not Gythion again.
–Why not? It’s not a bad idea, a dirty weekend by the sea.
–You’ve no one to be dirty with.
–Except himself.
–There’ll be tourists down there now, they’re always game for a laugh.
Now Jason’s eyes would be roaming the square. He had shaved his goatee that last week. The stubble had already grown back in, hollowing his cheeks. It made him look less comical. He seemed more voracious, perhaps more threatening: a rejuvenated Tom Waits or Jack Nicholson, a sexual predator, a crackhead driller killer.
–We have responsibilities here.
–Nothing that won’t keep.
–Someone will have to see to it.
–Yes, of course. That could be done tonight.
–We could go paddling.
–Skinny-dipping.
Natsuko, sighing and shifting into the last of the sun. –We could go swimming.
–It’s this waiting. I’m so tired of it.
–It’s almost over now.
–Is it?
–It must be soon, one way or the other. Easter is just around the corner.
Silence. In its lacuna he realised he had lost the thread of the conversation. He had missed something, had heard them wrong, he thought; and then Eberhard was talking again, his voice as guarded as Eleschen’s was irrepressible, and hearing the far-off sound of his name he stopped, stock-still in the kitchen door.
–And Ben?
–Enough of Ben.
–He’ll be upset.
–He is an impediment.
–Oh come on. He doesn’t mean to be.
–He doesn’t know anything.
–And who would he tell, if he did?
–You don’t like him much, do you, Max?
–I don’t trust him.
–You don’t trust anyone.
–He likes us.
–He loves you. Lucky girl.
–And so he would say nothing against us.
–Eb’s right. Let him come.
–I don’t care either way, I just want to see the sea. And sand. Let’s go somewhere with sand, can we? I’ve had enough of mud and stones and waiting.
–Pylos, then.
–Gythion is closer.
–We can’t go back t
o Gythion.
–It is not sensible to leave at all…but Eberhard is right. If we have to do this, then Pylos is safer.
–Sandy Pylos! Like in the stories, Eleschen said, so ingenuously delighted that by the time he rejoined them it was all decided.
They left by the Langádha Pass, up through the gorge with the first light behind them, over the boulders and scree of the tops, peak after peak rising above them, then down into a second night, darkness dug in under the pines, dawn unbroken in Artemisía, the sun not catching up with them again until the hairpinned descent to the dusty green orchards of the Messenian plain.
By eight they were at Kalamata, the traffic slowing along the city’s clogged arteries, first Natsuko and then both cars stuck behind belching gridlocks of long-haulage, bikers swerving between coaches, flatbeds stacked with watermelons, chickens in teetering highrise coops, bread and fibreglass and ice. Then they were through, and already the sky ahead was lucid and nacreous, as if it met the sea just beyond the horizon.
They changed drivers by the airfield, Ben taking over from Natsuko while Jason saw to Sylvia, the dog bug-eyed and ecstatic with thirst, gorging herself on bottled water before frolicking wickedly out of reach in the giant calamus grasses beside the road. By the time they had cajoled her back they were far behind the others, but there was only the one road ahead and he drove fast, overtaking tractors and weekend drivers until the Volvo came in sight, a pocket silver racer between green banks.
The road turned south-west after Messene. Jason was channel-surfing the radio, fishing for police frequencies. Natsuko was gazing out, shadows filming her face. The dog was asleep and agape.
Let her come, Eleschen had said, the night they had argued over Sylvia. And Jason had said the same about him, that last night on the balcony. They had talked about him as they had the dog, as if he too were no more than that. They had not done it to his face. That aside there had been no difference.
He shivered, and a moment later felt Natsuko’s hand, warm on his neck.
–What?
