The Names

fit. The way the second man walked to the other end of the wharf. The clear shadows.”'And then it disintegrated, literally, in dust.”Owen lapsed into thought, as he often did, stretching his legs, pushing the chair back against the wall. He had a tapered face with large shocked eyes. His hair was sparse. Pale brows, a bald spot. Sometimes his shoulders seemed cramped in the long narrow frame.'But we're still in Europe, aren't we?' he said, and I took this to be a reference to some earlier point. He came out of these thoughtful pauses saying things that weren't always easy to fit into the proper frame. 'No matter how remote you are, how far into the mountains or islands, how deep-ended you are, how much you want to disappear, there is still the element of shared culture, the feeling that we know these people, come from these people. Something beyond this is familiar as well, some mystery. Often I feel I'm on the edge of knowing what it is. It's just beyond reach, something that touches me deeply. I can't quite get it and hold it. Does anyone know what I mean?”No one knew.'But on the subject of balance, Kathryn, we see it here every day, although not quite as you've described. This is one of those Greek places that pits the sensuous against the elemental. The sun, the colors, the sea light, the great black bees, what physical delight, what fertile slow-working delight. Then the goatherd on the barren hill, the terrible wind. People must devise means to collect rainwater, buttress their houses against earthquakes, cultivate on steep rocky terrain. Subsistence. A deep silence. There's nothing here to soothe or refresh the landscape, no forests or rivers or lakes. But there's light and sea and sea birds, there's heat that rots ambition and stuns the intellect and will.”The extravagance of the remark surprised him. He laughed abruptly, in a way that welcomed us to share a joke at his expense. When he finished his wine he sat upright, legs drawn in.'Correctness of detail. This is what the light provides. Look to small things for your truth, your joy. This is the Greek specific.”Kathryn put down her glass.'Tell James about the people in the hills,' she said, and in she went, yawning.I wanted to follow her to the bedroom, lift her out of the sailcloth skirt. So much stale time to sweep aside. Jasmine budding in a toothbrush glass, all the senses rush to love. We nudge our shoes away and touch lightly, in shivers, feeling each other with an anxious reverence, alert to every nuance of contact, fingertips, floating bodies. Dip and lift again, arms around her buttocks, my face in the swale of her breasts. I groan with the burden, she laughs in the night wind. A parody of ancient abduction. Tasting the salt moisture between her breasts. Thinking as I lumber toward the bed how rhythmic and correct this beauty is, this simple thing of curves, human surfaces, the shape those island Greeks pursued in their Parian marble. Noble thought. The bed is small and set low, a swayback mattress hard at the edges. In time our breathing finds the same waver, the little cadence we will work to demolish. Some clothes slip off the chair, belt buckle ringing. That gaze of hers. Wondering who I am and what I want. The look in the dark I've never been able to answer. The look of the girl in the family album who asserts her right to calculate the precise value of what is out there. We take care to be silent. The boy in his own bed on the other side of the wall. This stricture is seamed so evenly into our nights we've come to believe there would be less pleasure without it. From the beginning, when he was taking shape in her, we tried to guide ourselves away from forceful emotions. It seemed a duty and a preparation. We would make ready a well-tempered world, murmurous, drawn in airy pastels. Noble thought number two. My mouth at the rim of her ear, all love's words unvoiced. This silence is a witness to broader loyalties.'It started simply enough,' Owen said. 'I wanted to visit the monastery. There's a trail that meanders in that general direction, barely wide enough for a motor scooter. It cuts through a vineyard, then climbs into the dusty hills. As the terrain rises and drops, you get intermittent views of those rock masses farther inland. The monastery is occupied, it's a working monastery according to local people, and visitors are welcome. The trouble with the path is that it disappears in thick shrubbery and rockfall about two miles from the destination. No choice but walk. I left the machine and started off. From the end of the path it's not possible to see the monastery or even the huge rock column it's attached to, so I found myself trying to reconstruct the terrain from those hurried glimpses I'd had a quarter of an hour earlier, on the scooter.”I could see her in the dark, moving along the bedroom wall, taking off her blouse as she went. The window was small and she passed quickly from view. A dim flash, the bathroom light. She closed the door. The sound of running water came from the other side of the house, where the toilet window was, like the sputter of something frying. Dark again. Owen tipped his chair against the wall.'There are caves along the way. Some of them looked to me like tomb caves, similar to the ones at Matala on the Libyan Sea. There are caves everywhere in Greece, of course. A definitive history is waiting to be written of cave habitation in this part of the world. It amounts to a parallel culture, I would imagine, right up to the nudists and hippies on Crete in recent years. I wasn't surprised, then, to see two figures, male, standing at the entrance to one of these caves, about forty-five feet above me. The hills have a greenish cast here, most of them are rounded at the top. I hadn't yet reached the pinnacle rocks, where the monastery is. I pointed ahead and asked these men in Greek if this was the way to the monastery. The odd thing is that I knew they weren't Greek. I felt instinctively it would be to my advantage to play dumb. Very strange, how the mind makes these calculations. Something about them. A haggard look, intense, fugitive. I didn't think I was in danger, exactly, but I felt I needed a tactic. / am harmless, a lost traveler. There I was, after all, in walking shoes and a sun hat, a little canvas bag on my back. Thermos bottle, sandwiches, chocolate. There were crude steps cut into the rock. Not at all recent. The men wore old shabby loose-fitting clothes. Faded colors mostly, Turkish sort of pants, or Indian, what younger travelers sometimes wear. You see them in Athens around cheap hotels in the Plaka and in places like the covered market in Istanbul and anywhere along the overland route to India, people in ashram clothes, drawstring clothes. One of the men had a scraggly beard and he was the one who called down to me, in Greek more halting than my own, ''How many languages do you speak?' Strangest damn thing to ask. A formal question. Some medieval tale, a question asked of travelers at the city gates. Did my entry depend on the answer? The fact that we'd spoken to each other in a language not our own deepened the sense of formal procedure, of manner and ceremony. I called up, 'Five,' again in Greek. I was intrigued but still wary and when he beckoned me up I took the steps slowly, wondering what people, for how many centuries, had lived in this place.”I had to concentrate to see her. Back in the bedroom, by the wall, in darkness. I tried to induce her to look this way by an act of will. She'd put on a chamois cloth shirt, one of my discards, good for sleeping alone, she'd told me smiling. An overlong garment, tailored in the old-fashioned way, it reached almost to her knees. I waited for her to see me staring in. I knew she'd look.This knowing was contained in the structure of my own seeing. We both knew. It was an understanding between us that bypassed the usual centers. I might even have predicted within a fraction of a second when her head would turn. And she did look up, briefly, one knee already lowered to the edge of the bed, and what she saw was Owen's elbow jutting across the window frame from his position in the tipped-back chair, Owen talking, and beyond this the spare calm educated face of her husband, violent in candlelight. I wanted a sign, something to interpret as favorable. But what could she give me in a crowded moment in the dark even if she knew my mind and wanted to ease it? That was the shirt she was wearing when she took a swipe at me with a potato peeler in one of the first of the dark days, our bird bath covered with snow.Reluctant adulterer.'There were two others near the cave entrance. One a woman, strong-featured, heavy, with cropped hair. The man was sitting just inside the entrance writing in a notebook. There was a stone fireplace nearby. Inside the cave I saw sleeping bags, knapsacks, straw mats, other things that didn't register clearly. The people were filthy, of course. Hair stringy with dirt. That particular clinging dirt of people who no longer notice. Dirt was their medium by now. It was their air, their nightly warmth. We sat outside the cave mouth on ledges, carved steps, rolled-up sleeping bags. One of the men pointed out the monastery, which was clearly visible from here. I decided to accept this as a friendly and reassuring gesture and tried not to notice the way they were studying me, inspecting minutely. We spoke Greek throughout, their version of it a mixture of older forms and demotiki, or what people actually speak.”He told them he was involved in epigraphy, his first and current love, the study of inscriptions. He went off on private expeditions, leaving the Minoan dig to his assistant. He'd recently come back from Qasr Hallabat, a ruined desert castle in Jordan, where he'd seen the fragmented Greek inscriptions known as the Edict of Anastasius. Before that he'd been to Tell Mardikh to study the Ebla tablets; to Mount Nebo to see the pavement mosaics; to Jerash, Palmyra, Ephesus. He told them he'd gone to Ras Shamrah in Syria to inspect a single clay tablet, about the size of a man's middle finger, that contained the entire thirty-letter alphabet of the Canaanite people who lived there well over three thousand years ago.They seemed excited by this, although no one referred to it until Owen was getting set to leave. He thought in fact they were trying to conceal their excitement. As he talked further about Ras Shamrah they were very still, they were careful not to look at each other. But he sensed an interaction, a curious force in the air, as though each of them sat in a charged field and these fields had begun to overlap. It turned out in the end they were interested in the alphabet. They explained this to him almost shyly in their defective Greek.Not Ras Shamrah. Not history, gods, tumbled walls, the scale poles and pumps of the excavators.The alphabet itself. They were interested in letters, written symbols, fixed in sequence.

Tap washed pottery shards in pans of water, scrubbing them with a toothbrush. The more delicate pieces he