Forgery

by Sabina Murray

  “Why did you bargain and bargain with that annoying man in Stavri over the statuette, if you find haggling so impossible?”

  “Bargain?” said Nikos. “With him?”

  “I could hear it in your voice. You were arguing back and forth.”

  “No, no,” he said. “We were talking about building a real road to the port, one that doesn’t have steps for the donkeys, and then he said something about buses. He wants to have buses. Remember, he’s running for mayor again.”

  But Nikos agreed it was probably time to check on the farmer. Besides, Amanda had gone into town to make a much-dreaded phone call to Jack, and Nikos didn’t want to be hanging around the garden when she came back.

  We had some trouble starting the Vespa. I was not good mechanically, and neither was Nikos, but he had more persistence. I stood for about ten minutes watching him try to get the thing going. He thought it might be the starter. A little boy with his sister came to watch and were joined a couple of minutes later by a dog. Nikos wiggled some wires somewhere, and the children watched with their unblinking black eyes. He tried again. The starter responded with a shattered whir that soon degenerated into a series of desperate clicks. Nikos jumped off the bike and walked away. He covered his mouth with his hand and shook his head, looking at the Vespa, seemingly offended and capable of violence.

  I said, “You’re thinking about Amanda.”

  Nikos looked at me. “No,” he said.

  “One more time, Nikos, and then I’ll get help,” I said.

  He turned the key again and finally, miraculously, gorgeously, there was a larger, deeper, coughing purr. Nikos was victorious.

  He gestured for me to get on the bike. “I am not thinking about Amanda,” he said. “I am thinking about me.”

  I knew that Amanda was in love with Nikos, or at least the drama he created. I knew that Nikos liked Amanda a lot. She was fun, and the calculated stupidity that she used to keep Jack strung along was, apparently, only trundled out for this specific purpose. But Nikos was engaged, although to a very young woman he hardly knew, and had completely and happily accepted his destiny as heir to the export business established by his father. When it came time to settle down, Nikos was not going to feel the victim. I leaned in my head to shield it behind Nikos’s shoulders and lit a cigarette. A dove flew by on its way somewhere, and I watched it for a bit. There was nothing to interrupt my view of its journey. I saw a cloud, rare thing, floating over the old town, and it created splashes of gray shadow on the whitewash, a sudden depth, but the cloud would not stay for long. In fact there was something unreal in its lonely shadowing. We reached the end of the gravel path that led to the farmer’s house and got off.

  “Is she going back?” I asked.

  “Amanda?” said Nikos. “Of course she’s going back.”

  “When?”

  Nikos stopped walking. He pulled my cigarette out of my mouth, took a drag, and threw it on the ground. “Do you want me to be sentimental?” he said patiently. “Why?”

  I shrugged. “Just making conversation.”

  “That means speaking without saying anything, yes?” Nikos shook his head. “She should be with her husband. Even she knows that.”

  “Good,” I said.

  Nikos really did believe in the sanctity of marriage. He even wanted it for me. Because Nikos wanted me to be happy, he thought I would return to Hester. Because he knew I missed my son, he thought I wanted another child. But he was wrong here. I never wanted another child. I would find myself staring at them, but the sound of their voices scared me. Their voices were the dark music of angels. The death of my own little boy had made them all—girls, boys, babies—otherworldly. But Nikos thought I wanted a child and Hester, and I understood, because all his problems would be solved or at least organized to some extent by the needs of family. He had no time for existential angst because he knew he was just a moment in the continuum of history, his story just a minute in the narrative of his family, and it gave him peace.

  There were three donkeys tied to the railing outside the farmer’s house. A young man was taking bundles of wood off of one and stacking them by a low stone wall. When the farmer appeared with a basket full of peppers, I was near speechless with joy.

  “He says this is going to be taken away today, and that some plants are still—”

  “Oh, for God’s sake, Nikos, tell me it’s over!”

  “We can dig,” he said. He patted my shoulder. “Are you happy now?”

  I felt rather infantilized by the whole thing. I could see the farmer thought I was crazy, and this was good for me, because being disparaged by Nikos openly and sincerely made my excavating the field extremely lucky for the farmer, a wonderful serendipitous event: an earthquake had coughed up all these broken pots, and then a crazy American had shown up to purchase them all.

  “I am happy,” I said.

  Nikos talked to the farmer as the donkeys were loaded down with vegetables. There was still some negotiating left and this, apparently, Nikos was quite willing to do. Nikos and I had agreed that it would be better to dig the field up quickly with about five workers than to draw it out and work with fewer. I knew that looting was almost irresistible and wanted to be around for all the active excavation. Nikos had warned the farmer that if things went missing, he wouldn’t be paid. And then Nikos had gone on to give the man a gun, something used around the turn of the century for hunting hare, that he had found in the attic of Neftali’s house. I’d never seen a gun like that, but it looked quite frightening, and that’s all that was needed.

  “All right,” said Nikos. “Now what?”

  “How about a celebratory drink?” I said.

  “And this time,” said Nikos, “we actually have something to celebrate.”

  We went to a café in the old town. It was across the valley from our field, and I could see that Nikos too spent most of his time watching our little plot of land in a proprietary way.

  “I wonder how old the stuff is?” I said, for the hundredth time.

  “I am,” said Nikos, lighting a cigarette, “as you say, cautiously optimistic.”

  “Funny,” I said, “because I was beginning to think you had no opinion at all.”

  Nikos agreed. “But I have a small reason to think this,” he said.

  “Why?”

  “Well, I was thinking if all this pottery appears because there is an earthquake, maybe it is all there because of an earthquake. But no one has built there for a long time. The wall and the tower at the top of the mountain”—we looked across the valley, above the little sheep farm, and saw the ancient tower and the wall—“have been there forever, but once there was a house.”

  “When was this?”

  “Who knows? We have so many ancient things everywhere that old things don’t make us too interested. When the villagers say old, it might be four hundred years or four thousand.”

  “But you’re cautiously optimistic. Why?”

  “Because many people know that once there was an old house, but where did this house go?”

  “Can’t be that long ago,” I said. I was already feeling disappointed, deflated at the possibility that a Venetian villa, since destroyed, was the source of all my artifacts.

  “It could be very long ago,” said Nikos. “Someone remembers the house, then some grandchild remembers the grandfather remembering the house, then someone finds a door and uses it for their own house. It’s there for four hundred years. Everyone says Where does this old door come from? and they say Near the old town, and when the door is gone someone remembers that.”

  “That sounds more like hearsay than provenance,” I said.

  Nikos smiled. “But there was a very big earthquake around 150 A.D., and that I am not making up.”

  “Well, I hope that’s when it’s from,” I said.

  “Memory here goes back a long time. The people don’t change, so it’s like the same people happening again and again,” said Nikos.

  “Lik
e reincarnation?”

  “What is this thing? I don’t know, but I am sure I am not talking about it.”

  “What are you talking about?” This was one of those rare occasions when Nikos got philosophical, and I’m sure the thought was equally vague when expressed in Greek.

  “I don’t know.” He laughed. “But things are talked about for years and years. A year on this island is not the same as a year somewhere else. It could be one minute, it could be a hundred years.”

  Nikos grew quiet. I could hear the sheep in the valley. I watched them hop among the walls in the distance, gray like the earth was gray. Somewhere a dog barked, and I saw a donkey making slow progress from the farmer’s house. The sun was high now, and the air had a bleached quality to it. A cat, sitting quite still, suddenly extended its leg and began to lick it vigorously. The waiter, leaning on his elbow at the next table, swung his worry beads onto the back of his hand and then against his leg, over and over in a rhythmic clacking. The distant growl of a motorbike bounced along the valley, until the bike rounded a curve and sputtered into view.

  “Do you think this place will stay like this?” I asked Nikos.

  “Yes,” said Nikos. “This is why all the foreigners come, and why all the Greeks leave.”

  We began digging the next day. Nikos had assembled his people, all relatives of Neftali’s caretaker. This small crew of five workers included Tomas. Clive had volunteered his time, insisting that I wake him early, but at seven o’clock he was impossible to move, and at eight, and when Nikos and I finally left the house at eight-thirty we didn’t even bother to look in on him. Nikos had ordered some brushes and sieves over the last couple of weeks at my request, but I wasn’t really sure how to go at it. I had no background in archaeology and realized I was trying to remember details from The Curse of Mummy and some higher budget mystery, name lost, that had featured archaeologists. I decided to rope off two areas, with me supervising one and Nikos supervising the other. This way we could keep track of things. I roped off two areas, each about six square feet, and then we split the workers—Nikos got three and I got Tomas and some teenager named Andreas who wanted to learn English—but when we all stepped into my roped-off areas it was on the crowded side. There was a pen a short distance away with a half-dozen sheep in it and when Tomas, casting a humored glance in that direction, made a joke, I understood and laughed along with everyone else, even though he’d made the joke in Greek.

  “We will abandon this roped-off thing,” I said to Nikos, “and we will return to the time-honored ‘dig around and tell me if you find something.’”

  By noon I had a nice collection of pottery fragments and was organizing them into little tin basins, trying to match pieces based on design or thickness, or what worker had dug them up in what area. The farmer came by at one point to check on our progress. He was smiling heartily and I knew it was because all we’d found was little, broken, and to all appearances, worthless; he had gotten the better deal and nothing, not even the glory of having an entire statue on par with The Charioteer pulled from the earth behind his house, could make him happier.

  An hour later I saw Clive walking along the valley. He was unmistakable, even at a distance. The road curved a lot and even though, as the crow flies, Clive wasn’t really that far off, it took him nearly half an hour to reach us. I would brush at my little bits of baked history and look up every now and then, to see how far he’d advanced. Each time he was a little bigger.

  By the time he was standing opposite me, across the divide of table, he was hot, dusty, and not interested in the dig at all.

  “Clive,” I said, “Good to see you.”

  “Unbelievable,” said Clive. “I was going to hitch a ride, but no one passed me, not even a donkey. Can I have a drink?” I gave Clive some water.

  “Look at this,” I said. I held the best fragment of the day, tiny but with a small flower design painted on it.

  “Very nice, but actually that’s not why I’m here.” Clive looked very grave for Clive, and Olivia entered my mind.

  “Is everything all right?” I asked.

  “Well, yes. Sort of.” He was trying to find a way to tell me, but knew that subtlety and phrasing were not his strengths. “Well, nothing to worry about.”

  I put down my fragment. “Clive, why are you here?”

  “It’s your ex-wife. She’s turned up on Aspros.”

  “Hester?”

  “Is that her name?” Clive had rolled himself a cigarette and he lit it. “You never talk about her.”

  I took the Vespa and dropped Clive at the villa before continuing on to the harbor, where apparently Hester was having a drink with Nathan. My thought the whole way to the port was that Uncle William was responsible for sending her. Her father was, after all, one of his close friends and he had expressed a strong desire for me to behave in a more adult fashion, to consider returning to my wife and work. Uncle William had to be careful with how he phrased such desires, as he did any time he began to sound paternal, because I had no tolerance for this sort of behavior and I had every right to feel this way. I knew protesting that I didn’t want to be married anymore wasn’t really very manly, but it was also treacherous territory on which to engage me in battle. At least for Uncle William. Perhaps he had sent Hester, above reproach in this regard, in his stead.

  I parked a short distance away and began the walk to Nathan’s regular café. I had been thinking about Uncle William precisely so as not to think about Hester, and it wasn’t until I saw her—she was wearing a black dress, very plain—that it occurred to me that she might have a reason more compelling than our failed marriage to make the journey.

  I watched her talking to Nathan, her back straight, every now and then angling her face to the side, a human imbalance that she corrected compulsively. I could tell she lacked sleep and knew something more than travel had caused this. I saw her reach her hands across the table like a cat stretching its claws; then she pulled them back quickly. No one was watching so why did she care? And then I realized that I was watching her, and then that she was watching me.

  Nathan stood up as soon as he saw me. I knew his chair was intended for me and had an urge to run—yes, run—in the opposite direction. It was not maturity that brought me to the table, but rather the need to disappoint Hester, who probably expected bad behavior.

  “Hello, Rupert,” she said.

  I bent down to kiss her on the cheek and formally shook hands with Nathan, who only that morning had greeted me by hitting my head with a newspaper.

  “I should let you talk,” said Nathan.

  And then I was seated across from her and saying nothing and she was rolling the stem of her wineglass in her fingers, but when she looked up and held my gaze I could see she was trying not to cry.

  “I have some bad news,” she said.

  I was dizzy, reliving that day four years ago when I had lost my son, but then I realized—a small kindness—that this could only happen once.

  She looked at me, inhaled in a patient and disgusted way, and said, “My father has died.”

  I sat quietly for a moment. “Heart attack?”

  “Yes,” she said. “You don’t seem that surprised.”

  “But I am, Hester. No one even told me he was sick.”

  Hester narrowed her eyes. “It was a heart attack.”

  “But why didn’t you tell me?”

  “Tell you what?” She glared effectively, then, waving her manicured hand sharply, summoned the waiter. “Another,” she said, raising her glass, “and a double bourbon on the rocks for him.”

  There was another moment of silence. I thought of Grolsz who had loved me and whom I had loved, but the moment was so abstracted by everything—the ocean, the teenagers playing backgammon, a sparrow fight in the eaves—that I felt I had to be making it up. I wanted to will the moment into the distant past, but the drinks arrived and Hester, purposefully and with seeming malice, took an impossibly small sip from her glass.

>   “You’re wondering why I’m here,” she said.

  “Yes,” I said, which wasn’t exactly true but was what I ought to have been wondering.

  “It’s in his will. He asked to be cremated and have his ashes scattered, and he wanted you present.”

  I considered this. Hester had never stated, but had often thought, that her father preferred me to her. She had a few reasons to suspect this. I was male. I had a better sense of humor. I had done him the favor of marrying his daughter, who was thirty-five at the time and whom he considered beyond marriageable age. All this was running through Hester’s head, and she was cornered by it.

  “You brought the ashes here?”

  “Yes,” she said.

  “Well, you’ve made it easy for me,” I said.

  “And if I hadn’t?” She sighed. “I could have enjoyed having my father’s ashes sit in the house until you were ready to come home and deal with it.”

  I lit a cigarette. “How is Uncle William taking it?”

  She gave me an intentionally awkward smile. “Your father,” she said, “is handling it very well.”

  “I’m sure my father,” I said, holding her look, “misses Max very much.”

  There was another silence.

  “I can take you for a drive later,” I said, “and we can find a good spot to scatter the ashes. We can go up to one of the monasteries, or perhaps rent a yacht.”

  “Shut up, Rupert. Please shut up.” She grabbed my cigarettes and she lit one. Hester was not usually a smoker. “I have to ask you something.”

  I was surprised that any questions remained between us, but I nodded.

  “Where were you?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Where were you the day that Michael drowned?”

  “I told you,” I said. “I was in a diner on the Upper East Side, having a cup of coffee.”

  “For four hours?”

  “It’s the truth.”

  Hester regarded me coldly. “I sat in the hospital by myself, then with my father, then with your father. Michael was so small and still …”