cleaned with a small paintbrush, fine-bristled.Kathryn and a male student worked a device called a rocking screen. The young man troweled dirt from a tall pile into a plastic bleach bottle with the upper section cut off. He spread this dirt onto a horizontal screen equipped with handles and held in position at elbow height by a bracketed wooden framework. Kathryn gripped the handles and rocked the dirt through the fine mesh, one hour, two hours, three hours.I sat in the shade, watching.
At twilight she and I walked down through the village to one of the fishing boats tied up at the pier. A small crucifix was nailed to the door of the wheelhouse. We sat on deck and watched people eating dinner in the two restaurants. She knew the owner of the boat and his sons. One of the sons had worked at the excavation, helping to clear the site and then digging trenches. The other son was limited in the work he could do, having lost a hand to dynamite.This second man stood about thirty yards away, beating an octopus against a rock. The small beach where he stood was littered with broken things and thick plastic sheeting. He held the octopus by the head and smashed its tentacles against the rock, over and over.'I had an erotic fantasy last night while Owen was talking about those people.”'Who was in it?' she said.'You and I.”'A man who has fantasies about his wife?”'I've always been backward in these matters.”'It must be the sun. The heat and sun are famous for generating this kind of thing.”'It was nighttime,' I said.We talked awhile about her nephews and nieces, other family matters, commonplaces, a cousin taking trumpet lessons, a death in Winnipeg. It seemed we could stray from Owen's evening seminars. We could talk to each other behind his back, as it were, as long as we didn't get too close to the basic state of things between us. The subject of family makes conversation almost tactile. I think of hands, food, hoisted children. There's a close-up contact warmth in the names and images. Everydayness. She had one sister in England, two in western Canada, people in six provinces altogether, Sinclairs and Pattisons and their extensions in insulated houses with aluminum siding at the back and half a cord of wood stacked against the sides. This is life below the white line, the permafrost. People sitting in renovated kitchens, decent, sad, a little bitter in an undirected way. I felt I knew them. Bass fishermen. Presbyterians.When children race out of rooms the noise of their leaving remains behind. When old people die, she'd once been told, they leave a smell on things.'My father hated that hospital. He'd always feared doctors and hospitals. He never wanted to know what was wrong. All those tests, that whole year of tests, I began to think he would die of tests. He preferred not knowing. But once they put him in the hospital, he knew.”'He needed a drink. He kept telling me. It became a complicated joke between us.”'Many drinks.”'I wish he could have gone to this subterranean place in Athens I sometimes go to with David Keller. When someone asks whether they have bourbon, the bartender says smugly, 'Yes, of course, James Beam, very good.'‘'James Beam. That is very good. He liked his bourbon.”'He liked American things.”'A common failing.”'Despite the propaganda he kept hearing from one of his children.”'Four years now, isn't it?”'Four years. And that incredible thing he said near the end. 'I commute all sentences. Pass the word. The criminals are forgiven.' Which I will never forget.”'He could barely speak.”'Deadpan. Absolutely deadpan to the end.”This talk we were having about familiar things was itself ordinary and familiar. It seemed to yield up the mystery that is part of such things, the nameless way in which we sometimes feel our connections to the physical world.
In the room I put things in my overnight bag, planning to be on the early boat to Naxos, on to Piraeus from there. I heard someone whistling outside. A single birdlike note, repeated. I went out to the balcony. Two men played backgammon at a folding table set against the hotel wall. Owen Brademas stood under a tree across the street, looking up at me, arms crossed on his chest.'I went up to the house.”'They're asleep,' I said.'I thought you'd all be up there.”'She's up at five tomorrow. We both are.”'It isn't necessary for her to be at the site so damn early.”'She has to heat water and make breakfast and do fourteen other things. She writes letters, she reads. Come on up.”There were five or six other villages on the island. Owen lived just outside the southernmost of these in a concrete dwelling called He dig house. It was located about a mile from the excavation. His assistant and the remaining fieldworkers also lived there. People in the houses scattered along the route from this village to that one must have wondered at the night-riding man sitting tall and awkward on his motor scooter, passing between the barley fields, the bamboo windbreaks.I used a towel to clean off the chair on the balcony and then I carried out a spindle chair with an upholstered seat. Intermittent wind came biting up off the water.'Is this an imposition, James? Just say so.”'It'll be another hour or two before I'm ready to sleep. Sit down.”'Do you sleep?”'Not as well as I used to.”'I don't sleep,' he said.'Kathryn sleeps. I used to sleep. Tap sleeps, of course.”'It's pleasant here. Our house isn't well sited. It seems to catch and retain heat.”'What is it you find on those stones, Owen, that's so intriguing?”He stretched his body, easing into an answer.'At first, years ago, I think it was mainly a question of history and philology. The stones spoke. It was a form of conversation with ancient people. It was also riddle- solving to a certain degree. To decipher, to uncover secrets, to trace the geography of language in a sense. In my current infatuation I think I've abandoned scholarship and much of the interest I once had in earlier cultures. What the stones say, after all, is often routine stuff. Inventories, land sale contracts, grain payments, records of commodities, so many cows, so many sheep. I'm not an expert on the origin of writing but it seems to be the case that the first writing was motivated by a desire to keep accounts. Palace accounts, temple accounts. Bookkeeping.”'And now?”'Now I've begun to see a mysterious importance in the letters as such, the blocks of characters. The tablet at Ras Shamrah said nothing. It was inscribed with the alphabet itself. I find this is all I want to know about the people who lived there. The shapes of their letters and the material they used. Fire-hardened clay, dense black basalt, marble with a ferrous content. These things I lay my hands against, feel where the words have been cut. And the eye takes in those beautiful shapes. So strange and reawakening. It goes deeper than conversations, riddles.”'Why do you call this an infatuation?”'Well it just is, James. It's an unreasoning passion. It's extravagant, foolish, probably short-lived.”All this with sweeping gestures, in open vocal rhythms. Then he laughed, although it may be more accurate to say he 'laughed out,' as one cries out or calls out. So much that he said and did had a tone of trustful surrender to it. It was my guess that he lived with the consequences of self-discovery and I suspected this was a more exacting hardship than anything the world might have worked out for him.'And these people in the hills. You'll go back?”'I don't know. They talked about moving on.”'There's a practical element. What
