Awake. The pulsing cry of doves. I have to concentrate to form a sense of whereabouts. Up, into the world, crank the shutters open. The beekeeper in the garden of the British School marches in his hooded bonnet to the box hives. I take the coffee mug from the drain basket, set the water boiling. Mount Hymettus is a white shadow, summer mornings, a vaporous reach to the gulf. Today's a market day, a man is chasing peaches down the steep street below the terrace restaurants. A pickup has hit his, knocking a bushel off the end, and the peaches come down the asphalt surface in wobbling rows. The man is trying to head them off, running low to the ground and making sweeping motions with his arm. A boy stands under the mulberry trees, hosing down the floor of the restaurants. Where the pickups have met, a vast gesturing goes on between the driver of one vehicle and a friend of the stooped and running man. An envelope of Nescafe, a leftover donut. The phone is ringing, the first of the day's wrong numbers. Doves lighting on the still tips of cypresses. The men from the cafe around the corner come into view, watching the peaches roll. They lean into the street with care, evaluating gravely, prepared to extend only so much in effort and gesture. Honeybees rise clustered in the dusty light.I walk to the office, where I make myself another cup of coffee and wait for the telex to address me.
Marriage is something we make from available materials. In this sense it's improvised, it's almost offhand. Maybe this is why we know so little about it. It's too inspired and quicksilver a thing to be clearly understood. Two people make a blur.Charles Maitland and I discussed this, sitting on a bench in the National Gardens, where it was fifteen degrees cooler than in the bright city around us. Kids walked by, eating rings of sesame bread.'You're talking about modern marriage. Americans.”'Kathryn is Canadian.”'New World then.”'I think you're out of touch.”'Of course I'm out of touch. And a good thing too. Spare me from being in touch. The point is that the thing you describe has nothing to do with wedlock. “He produced the word like a gold coin between his teeth. Handsome battered face. Burst capillaries, streaked blue eyes. He was fifty-eight, a half shambles, broad, ruddy, silver-browed, racked by fits of coughing. Sundays he drove alone to a field outside the city and flew his radio- controlled model plane. It weighed nine pounds and cost two thousand dollars.'True,' I said. 'Wedlock was the last thing Kathryn and I thought we'd entered. We hadn't entered a state at all. If anything, we'd broken out of states and nations and firm designs. She used to say this marriage is a movie. She didn't mean it wasn't real. The whole thing flickered. It was a series of small flickering moments. But at the same time calm and safe. A day-to-day life. Restrained, moderate. I thought if you didn't want anything, your marriage was bound to work. I thought the trouble was that everyone wanted. They wanted in different directions. Tap, coming along, reinforced the feeling that we were making it up day by day, little by little, but sanely, contentedly, with no huge self-seeking visions.”'I'm thirsty,' he said.'A drink would kill you.”'It flickered. It was a series of flickers. You were calm and safe.”'We had incredible fights.”'When the old girl gets here, we're going for a drink.”'I'm having lunch with Rowser. Come along.”'Christ, no. Christ, not him.”'Be a sport,' I said.Shaded paths. Watercourses and stone fountains. A dense green place with towering trees that provided a fan vaulting, a cover against the enlarged-heart panics of central Athens. The landscape had a pleasing randomness. It was an enticement to wander foolishly, to get lost without feeling you were part of a formalist puzzle, a garden of hedge traps and designed escapes. A dozen men talked politics under a pine tree. Intermittently Charles listened, translating for me. He and Ann had been married twenty-nine years (she was seven or eight years younger than he was). In that time he'd held various jobs involving the security of overseas branches of British and American corporations. He now worked on a consulting basis, advising mainly on fire safety, something of a drop in status and income, considering the living to be made in terror.They'd lived in Egypt, Nigeria, Panama, Turkey, Cyprus, East Africa, the Sudan and Lebanon. These stays were anywhere from one year to four. They'd lived elsewhere, including the States, for shorter periods, and they'd been through a number of things, from house arrest and deportation, Cairo '56, to heavy shelling and infectious hepatitis, Beirut '76. Ann talked about these episodes in a tone of remote sadness, as if they were things she'd heard about or read in the newspaper. Maybe she felt unqualified to share the emotions of the native-born. The Lebanese were the victims, Beirut was the tragedy, the world was the loser. She never mentioned what they themselves had lost in any of the places they'd lived. It was Charles, finally, who told me that everything in their small home in Cyprus had been stolen or destroyed when the Turks rolled over the countryside and he implied this was only one of several ruinous events. They'd seemed, the troops, to have a deep need to pull things out of walls, whatever was jutting-pipes, taps, valves, switches. The walls themselves they'd smeared with shit.There was a protocol of coping, of making do, and Ann was expert. I was learning that reticence was fairly common in such matters. There was a sense in which people felt it was self-incriminating to speak out against these violations. I thought I sometimes detected in people who had lost property or fled, most frequently in Americans, some mild surprise that it hadn't happened sooner, that the men with the six-day beards hadn't come much earlier to burn them out, or uproot the plumbing, or walk off with the prayer rugs they'd bargained for in the souk and bought as investments-for the crimes of drinking whiskey, making money, jogging in shiny suits along the boulevards at dusk. Wasn't there a sense, we Americans felt, in which we had it coming?Port Harcourt, Nigeria, Ann said, was the only real regret. There was sweet crude in the delta, a howling loneliness. Charles was doing security and safety for a refinery built by Shell and British Petroleum. She fled to Beirut and the war in the streets. The marriage lost some of its conviction but made eventual gains in the category of rueful irony when BP's assets were nationalized.They didn't want to go back home. Too many years of elaborate skies, lithe people with plaited hair, red-robed, in bare feet. Or was that England today? They thought they might retire to California, where they had a son in graduate school, some kind of raving savant by the sound of it-a mathematician.'The idea is to learn the language,' Charles said, 'but not to let them know. This is what I do. I don't let people know unless absolutely pressed.”'But then what good is it?”'I listen. I listen all the time. I pick up things, listening. I have an advantage in this regard. I'm not only a foreigner. I don't look as if I speak Greek.”'This is an incredible distinction, Charles. Are you serious?”'You want to pick up whatever you can.”'But don't you do business here occasionally?”'One does business in English. Surely you've come to suspect this.”'If I ever learn the language, I'll speak it as often as possible. I want to talk to them, I want to hear what they're saying. These men arguing, there's something serious, almost loving about it. I want to interrupt, ask questions.”'You won't pick up anything, talking to them.”'I don't want to pick up anything.”'Using my method, you'll learn infinitely more.”'Charles, your method is crazy.”'What about a Heineken then? Is it possible in this country to get beer in green bottles?”'Seriously, do you speak Arabic?”'Of course.”'I envy that. I really do.”'Ann's a brilliant linguist. She's done translation, you know. She's very good.”'My kid speaks Ob. It's a kind of pig Latin. You insert o-b in certain parts of words.”Charles hunched forward, his cigarette burning to the filter.'Something almost loving,' he mumbled, glancing at the men around the tree.'You know what I mean. There's a certain quality in the language.”'You want to interrupt. You want to ask questions.”I watched Ann cross to us, emerging from a ring of poplars. A gait with a pleasing sway. Even at a distance, her mouth showed the small pursed conceit of a remark in the making. We stood, flanking her, and headed down a path toward the nearest gate.'At any given time,' she said, 'half the women in Athens are having their hair done by the other half.”'They've worked wonders, clearly,' Charles said.'It is such confusion. I'd still be there had it not been for no-shows and dropouts. James, I've never realized. You have khaki hair.”'It's brown.”'If jeeps had hair, it would look like yours. He has khaki hair,' she told Charles.'Leave him alone. He's having lunch with George Rowser.”'He's having lunch with us. Where are we off to?”'We'll have dinner,' I said.'Good. Shall I call anyone?”'Call everyone.”'What are all these people doing in the park?' she said. 'Greeks hate fresh air.”
