kind of slow, I think, one of those gawky boys who stands around squinting into the glare. I worked, I did chores, a dutiful son, unhappy. But I don't think I so much as scribbled a single line of poetry, Kathryn, not one.”The flames went flat, shot down, unstable in the wind. The trembling light seemed to wish an urgency on us. I was taking wine in half-glass bursts, getting drier all the time. The others rambled calmly toward midnight.'Solitude.”'We lived in town for a time. Then outside, a lonely place, barely a place at all.”'I was never alone,' she said. 'When my mother died I think my father made a point of filling the house with people. It was like one of those old stage comedies in which the main characters are about to set sail for Europe. The set is full of luggage. Friends and well-wishers keep showing up. Complications develop.”'We were in the middle. Everything was around us, somehow equidistant. Everything was space, extremes of weather.”'We kept moving. My father kept buying houses. We'd live in a house for a while and then he'd buy another. Sometimes he got around to selling the old one, sometimes he didn't. He never learned how to be wealthy. People might despise a man for that but everyone liked him. His house-buying was anything but ostentatious. There was a deep restlessness in him, an insecurity. He was like someone trying to slip away in the night. Loneliness was a disease he seemed to think had been lying in wait for him all along. Everyone liked him. I think this worried him somehow. Made sad by friendship. He must have had a low opinion of himself.”'Then I was a man. In fact I was forty. I realized I saw the age of forty from a child's viewpoint.”'I know the feeling,' I said. 'Forty was my father's age. All fathers were forty. I keep fighting the idea I'm fast approaching his age. As an adult I've only been two ages. Twenty-two and forty. I was twenty-two well into my thirties. Now I've begun to be forty, two years shy of the actual fact. In ten years I'll still be forty.”'At your age I began to feel my father present in me. There were unreal moments.”'You felt he was occupying you. I know. Suddenly he's there. You even feel you look like him.”'Brief moments. I felt I'd become my father. He took me over, he filled me.”'You step into an elevator, suddenly you're him. The door closes, the feeling's gone. But now you know who he was.”'Tomorrow we do mothers,' Kathryn said. 'Except count me out. I barely remember mine.”'Your mother's death is what did it to him,' I said.She looked at me.'How could you know that? Did he talk to you about it?”'No.”'Then how could you know that?”I took a long time filling the glasses and composed my voice to sound a new theme.'Why is it we talk so much here? I do the same in Athens. Inconceivable, all this conversation, in North America. Talking, listening to others talk. Keller threw me out at six-thirty the other morning. It must be life outdoors. Something in the air.”'You're half smashed all the time. That's one possibility.”'We talk more, drunk or sober,' I said. 'The air is filled with words.”He looked past us, firmly fixed, a lunar sadness. I wondered what he saw out there. His hands were clasped on his chest, large hands, nicked and scarred, a digger and rock gouger, a plowboy once. Kathryn's eyes met mine. Her compassion for the man was possibly large enough to allow some drippings for the husband in his supplication. Merciful bountiful sex. The small plain bed in the room at the end of the hotel corridor, sheets drawn tight. That too might be a grace and favor of the island, a temporary lifting of the past.'I think they're on the mainland,' Owen said.How could you understand, he seemed to be asking. Your domestic drama, your tepid idiom of reproach and injury. These ranks of innocent couples with their marriage wounds. He kept looking past us.'They said something about the Peloponnese. It wasn't entirely clear. One of them seemed to know a place there, somewhere they might stay.”Kathryn said, 'Is this something the police ought to be told?”'I don't know. Is it?' The movement of his hand toward the wine glass brought him back. 'Lately I've been thinking of Rawlinson, the Englishman who wanted to copy the inscriptions on the Behistun rock. The languages were Old Persian, Elamite and Babylonian. Maneuvering on ladders from the first group to the second, he nearly fell to his death. This inspired him to use a Kurdish boy to copy the Babylonian set, which was the least accessible. The boy inched across a rock mass that had only the faintest indentations he might use for finger-grips. Fingers and toes. Maybe he used the letters themselves. I'd like to believe so. This is how he proceeded, clinging to the rock, passing below the great bas-relief of Darius facing a group of rebels in chains. A sheer drop. But he made it, miraculously, according to Rawlinson, and was eventually able to do a paper cast of the text, swinging from a sort of bosun's chair. What kind of story is this and why have I been thinking about it lately?”'It's a political allegory,' Kathryn said.'Is that what it is? I think it's a story about how far men will go to satisfy a pattern, or find a pattern, or fit together the elements of a pattern. Rawlinson wanted to decipher cuneiform writing. He needed these three examples of it. When the Kurdish boy swung safely back over the rock, it was the beginning of the Englishman's attempt to discover a great secret. All the noise and babble and spit of three spoken languages had been subdued and codified, broken down to these wedge-shaped marks. With his grids and lists the decipherer searches out relationships, parallel structures. What are the sign frequencies, the phonetic values? He wants a design that will make this array of characters speak to him. After Rawlinson came Norris. It's interesting, Kathryn, that both these men were at one time employed by the East India Company. A different pattern here, again one age speaks to another. We can say of the Persians that they were enlightened conquerors, at least in this instance. They preserved the language of the subjugated people. This same Elamite language was one of those deciphered by the political agents and interpreters of the East India Company. Is this the scientific face of imperialism? The humane face?”'Subdue and codify,' Kathryn said. 'How many times have we seen it?”'If it's a story about how far men will go,' he said, 'why have I been thinking about it? Maybe it bears on the murder of that old man. If your suspicions about the cult are well-founded, and if they are a cult, I can tell you it probably wasn't a senseless killing, Kathryn. It wasn't casual. They didn't do it for thrills.”'You saw them and talked to them.”'That's my judgment. I could be wrong. We could all be wrong.”I looked ahead to the walls of my hotel room. Standing by the bed in my pajamas. I always felt silly in pajamas. The name of the hotel was Kouros, like the village, the island, the ship that provided passage to and from the island. Singly knit. The journey that shares the edges of destinations. Mikro Kamini, where the old man was found, means small furnace or kiln. I always felt a surge of childlike pride, knowing such things or figuring them out, even when a dead body was the occasion for my efforts. The first fragment of Greek I ever translated was a wall slogan in the middle of Athens.
'An early night for Owen.”'Maybe an early season,' she said. 'The chairman of the graduate program paid a visit. He's been in Athens, conferring with the ASCS. A reevaluation is in progress. But it may be good news in the long run. We could get going again as early as April next year. May at the latest. That's the word.”'With Owen?”'With or without. Probably the latter. No one knows what Owen's plans are. It's this loose structure that's caused so much trouble around here.”'Trouble for everyone but you.”'Exactly. I'm the one who's benefited. And Owen is sure I'll be able to come back. So. At least we have a rough idea how things stand. It's what you've been wanting.”How easy it was to sit there and reorganize our lives across the jet streams and the seasons. We were full of ideas, having learned to interpret the failed marriage as an occasion for enterprise and personal daring. Kathryn was specially adept at this. She loved to round on a problem and make it work for her. We discussed her proposals, seeing in them not only distance and separation but a chance to exploit these. Fathers are pioneers of the skies. I thought of David Keller flying to New York to eat banana splits with his children in a midtown hotel. Then back across the sea to consolation and light, Lindsay tanning bare-breasted on their terrace.Kathryn and I agreed. She and Tap would go to London at summer's end. They would stay with her sister Margaret. They would
