Berenice: “What is your business? At least your business with him?” “It’s true you know nothing about me except what my sister looks like. I had a chance to tell Paul, but I wasted it. I did hear a lot about his business. No sooner had I mentioned that my interest in him was professional than he took me firmly in hand. He turned us away from our little group and the glittering heaps of fish and led me to the docks nearby, where he put me (unquestioned and unquestioning — he correctly assumed that I knew he dealt in textiles) aboard a fifteen-foot, square-sterned skiff powered by an outboard motor. It bore us efficiently to the little island six hundred yards out in the bay — you’ve undoubtedly noticed it. On the way, Paul told me that on his journey here he had found himself in the company of two men from the Levant, a father and son named Mehmed and Ahmet; they had long lived in communities of spinners and weavers, they had even worked with a master rugmaker. ‘Meeting them seemed like a stroke of luck, and I’ve always taken my luck seriously. I told them of my trade and offered them the option of coming to work for me if they needed jobs. They did. You are about to see them in action.’
“Paul was beginning to interest me in ways I hadn’t foreseen. I can’t say I liked him. He made no effort to be likeable, but forthrightness isn’t necessarily a fault. Approaching the island, I saw that there were no buildings except for one large wooden structure — his ‘modest factory.’ Paul explained that he had converted it from what used to be a fisherman’s refuge-cum-depot. He had done this work immaculately, as was evident even in the little yard that preceded the factory proper. Any ravages of time and random visitors had been expunged. Inside, the walls had been neatly repainted, and the various machines placed in a way that allowed easy access to them and left the overall space uncrowded and almost elegant, clearly a labor of love, and of some underlying commitment to the perfectibility of work. In the second room Mehmed and Ahmet were busy at their tasks, so busy that Paul refrained from interrupting them. Aside from one rapid glance, concentrated on what they were doing, they paid no attention to us anyway.
“Paul immediately began explaining their purpose in what soon became mind-numbing detail. A preparatory cloth had already been made from two different kinds of fleece washed and mordanted with madder, weld, and pomegranate skins and combined into denser fabric than either wool could form alone. Ahmet had cut this colored cloth into ornamental shapes that he then laid on the floor on mats of appropriate size assembled from local reeds, onto which Mehmed, using a forked cherry-wood tool called a cubuk, was now tossing clumps of carded wool with prodigious accuracy. Paul then launched into a description of what would happen subsequently, but this I will spare you. In fact I spared myself as much of it as I decently could, pretexting an appointment in town that I thought was invention but which became real enough soon after Paul had returned me to shore (a providential east wind made further talk impossible): meeting you. I’m happy to have been in time for that. There you were, standing out of the wind in the shade of your parasol, I walked up to you as though I’d known you forever, the woman I’d longed for since the dawn of time.”
2
John and Paul were also visitors to the town. They were twins, as identical as can be. They wore the same clothes, chino trousers and open-neck sweaters, in John’s case adorned with a faded maroon neckerchief. Both were addicted to the shellfish harvested year-round from the rocks and sands of the coast: little clams, winkles, cockles, crabs, and above all sea urchins — their dessert, as both said. They drank only McEwan’s India pale ale and smoked the same thin black Brazilian cigars. They drove identical cars, beige postwar Dyna-Panhards from France, indistinguishable except by their license plates. Neither ventured out late in the evening: they were hard workers, Paul at his island factory, John off long before dawn as mate on a fishing boat, where he earned good wages and an enviable reputation. Each had taken lodgings in rather shabby boarding houses. Each read the International Herald Tribune, sent by mail; never — at least in public — a book of any sort. Their intonation and accent afforded no key to their identities, although they said very different things. The only clues were John’s neckerchief and his occasional wearing of wire-rimmed reading glasses.
Their boarding houses lay far apart, at opposite sides of the town. John attended the Methodist church, Paul the Roman Catholic. They drank their pale ale at different bars. They were in fact never seen together and apparently avoided all commerce with one another. This puzzled but did not disturb the native inhabitants — “an odd story” was the general remark on their relationship, or the lack of one. John and Paul had been accepted on their own terms by the community: John being accounted the more genial of the two, Paul’s tendency to gruffness excused as a sign of seriousness; and, of course, his bringing his small industry to the town counted in his favor.
“Won’t you tell me, Andreas, what you think of them? For starters, what is your secretive business with Paul?” “There’s nothing secretive about it — it’s simply that the subject never came up before. I’ve never mentioned my politics either, or my favorite books or operas. Between sweet love-making and sweet
