largeness of things.
At the airport the next evening I stood with Rajiv and Tap under the status board, talking about the destinations and wondering what Rajiv saw when he came across words like Benghazi and Khartoum. I wondered what Tap saw.'Will you be glad to go back to India for good?' I said. 'Your father thinks sometime next year.”'Yes, I'll be glad. It's not so cold and I like school there. We run races and I'm very fast.”'Is he very fast, Tap?”'He's pretty fast. He's faster than a three-legged dog.”'So this is good. He has one more leg than I.”'What will you study when you get back?' I said.He held his breath at most questions. His face grew intense, he evaluated the implications, the depths of meaning. I watched him puff up his chest as he prepared to deliver an answer.'Mathematics. Hindi. Sanskrit. English.”Later I watched from a distance as Anand said goodbye to the boy. Being a father seemed his natural talent. There was something reassuring in him, a strong settling presence that must have made Rajiv feel his aircraft would glide toward the Arabian Sea on the soft air of his own father's commanding. The boy was preparing to enter hushed places. Out of this bedlam of departing people and the voices that gather around them, he would take an escalator down to the area restricted to passengers. The people with documents, the lounge, the softer chairs, the more purposeful waiting. At the boarding gate, the last of the static chambers, the stillness is more compact, the waiting narrowed. He will notice hands and eyes, the covers of books, a man with a turban and netted beard. The crew is Japanese, the security Japanese, all this planned by his father. He hears Tamil, Hindi, and begins curiously to feel a sense of apartness, something in the smell of the place, the amplified voice in the distance. It doesn't feel like earth. And then aboard, even softer seats. He will feel the systems running power through the aircraft, running light, running air. To the edge of the stratosphere, world hum, the sudden night. Even the night seems engineered, Japanese, his brief sleep calmed by the plane's massive heartbeat. The journey is a muted pause between the noise of Athens and the roiling voice of Bombay.We went to the observation deck.He was traveling with two people he knew. Still, it was a considerable event for a nine-year-old, a separation based on thrust, speed and altitude, fiercer, more intense for this reason than the parting of the following day, when Tap would go with Anand back to the island.It was an hour to sunset. Tap had a secret eye on a group of men in leisure suits and Arab dress, talking softly. A dense light lay on the gulf. Faint shapes in the haze, destroyers and merchant ships. We watched the planes take off.'I heard something else,' Anand said. 'They were there a long, long time. Do you know about the rock shelter?”'Which island are we talking about?”'Kouros. There were three men, one woman. In a rock shelter.”'Owen told me.”'They were there a long time. Through the entire winter if you can imagine it. The murder on Donoussa was a year ago. I don't know for a fact that there were any foreigners on Donoussa then. There was a murder, that's all I know. Same type of weapon.”He was looking out toward the runway.'Several questions,' I said. 'Did you ever see these people? Around the dig, in the village nearby? Did you ever go up toward the monastery? Owen told you what they look like, didn't he, how they dress?”'I never saw people like this anywhere on the island. The island is a damned uninteresting place. Who comes? That's a nice enough village where Kathryn rented the house. But what else is there? You never see anyone. Greeks come now and then. Old French or German couples. These people would stand out. Believe it.”'How do you know they spent the winter in that cave?”'Owen told me. Who else? He's the only one who's seen them.”'Anand, they didn't drop out of the sky. Other people must have seen them. They had to step off a boat. They had to make their way to the shelter.”'Maybe they arrived at different times, one by one, and they were not so disheveled then, or filthy and hungry. No one noticed.”'He didn't tell me they were there for such a long period.”'Owen is selective,' Anand said. 'You mustn't be hurt.”We laughed. Tap made his way closer, pointing toward the runway. We saw a 747 lift slowly in the silver haze, the blast wave reaching us before the plane banked over the gulf. Anand watched it out of sight. Then we walked down to the car and headed back to Athens.'They were eating,' Tap said.'Who was eating?”'The Arabs at the airport when we were waiting for the plane to take off. They had food.”'So what?”'It's Ramadan.”'That's right, it is,' I said.'The sun was still out.”'But maybe they're not Muslims.”'They looked like Muslims.”'What does a Muslim look like?”'He doesn't look like you or me.”'The first year I taught in the States,' Anand said, 'they all wanted to come to me for lessons in meditation. A Hindu. They wanted me to teach them how to breathe.”'Did you know how to breathe?”'I didn't know how to breathe. I still don't know. What a joke. They wanted to control their alpha waves. They thought I could tell them how to do this.”All through dinner Anand talked about religion with Tap. Undreamed sights. Vultures circling the towers of silence, where Parsees leave their dead. Jains wearing gauze over their mouths to keep from breathing insects and killing them. Serious people, Tap saw. He was enjoying himself, his fork in a melon wedge in the garden taverna. He grew watchful and still as Anand described ash-gray men wandering naked with begging bowl and staff, holy men, sadhus, walking out their lives in mud and dust.I kept waiting for Tap to ask about his own religion, if he'd ever had one or if his parents had and what happened to it if they had. We were doubters, I might have told him. Skeptics of the slightly superior type. The Christian dispersion. It was one of many things Kathryn and I agreed on, rockbound doubt, not that we'd ever discussed it. It was just there, or not there, something we knew about each other. The quasi-stellar object, the quantum event, these were the sources of our speculation and wonder. Our bones were made of material that came swimming across the galaxy from exploded stars. This knowledge was our shared prayer, our chant. The grim inexplicable was there, the god-mass looming. If we see God as a being, I might have said to Tap, the only true response is the wandering sadhu's. Go naked in a scatter of ashes, stand in the burning sun. If there is God, how could we fail to submit completely? Existence would be decrease, going clean. And adding beauty to the world, Kathryn might say. To her the spectacle had merit even if the source was obscure. They would be beautiful to see, leaning on staffs, mind-scorched, empty-eyed, men in the dust of India, lips moving to the endless name of God.The alphabet.Later I sat alone outside, hearing the day-end noise die slowly, voices in the terrace restaurants, the two-part drone of insects in the cypress trees. True night. The Doppler bursts of motorcycles taking the hill.Anand had said the island was safe, he was sure of it, they were gone. I asked him how many times Owen had been to the rock shelter. Many. But Owen had told me he saw them only once; when he went back a second time, they were gone. Anand said he was in a position to know about Owen's absences from the site. Owen had seen them more than once. Believe it.Early the next morning I watched their boat move off. A full day's trip even if the connecting boat was on time. Already Kathryn would be at the site, picking away with a grapefruit knife and tweezers. 'Sherding' they called it. Washing the finds. Boxing the finds. Labeling the boxes. And she'd be on the roof when the boat came into view, a flashlight rigged above her record sheets, her cross-section drawings of the scarp.Each blazing day she grew into something slightly newer. The wind blew so hot it stripped the bougainvillea of flowers. Water was being rationed, the phones were out. But the conservator was back, gluing pots together, giving them chemical baths. There was activity. One of the students was sinking a trench in the olive grove. Things were not finished. There were always finds to make.She would walk down to the dock and watch him come off the boat with his knapsack and half smile.Home.
Through Istanbul the long cabs passed in the gloom, Olds 88s, Buick Roadmasters, Chrysler limousines, DeSotos with busted mufflers, the Detroit overstocks of the decades, a city of dead cars. From the air all the cities looked like brown storms collecting, traps of heat and dust. Rowser sent me to Cairo for one day to finish an update for the local associate, a man who'd suffered a stroke in the lobby of the Sheraton. Cairo the radarless airport, Cairo the flocks of red-dyed sheep crossing downtown streets, the roofless buses, people hanging over the sides. In Karachi there was barbed wire, broken glass cemented to the tops of walls, trucks carrying trees in burlap sacking. Military governments always plant trees. It shows their gentle side.In the Istanbul Hilton I ran into a man named Lane, a lawyer who did work for the Mainland Bank. The day before he'd run into Walid Hassan, one of David Keller's credit officers, at the Inter-Con in Amman. I'd last seen Hassan in Lahore, the Hilton, where we'd run into each other at the front desk, each of us signing a document allowing us to have a drink in the bar that lay behind an unmarked door off the lobby. In the bar we ran into a man named Case, who was Lane's boss.Case had come from Nairobi with a one-sentence story. When Kampala fell to the Tanzanian forces, people greeted them with flowers and fruit and beat their own captured troops to death in the street.All these places were one-sentence stories to us. Someone would turn up, utter a sentence about foot-long lizards in his hotel room in Niamey, and this became the solid matter of the place, the means we used to fix it in our minds. The sentence was effective, overshadowing deeper fears, hesitancies, a rife disquiet. There was around us almost nothing we knew as familiar and safe. Only our hotels rising from the lees of perennial renovation. The sense of things was different in such a way that we could only register the edges of some elaborate secret. It seemed we'd lost our capacity to select, to ferret out particularity and trace it to some center which our minds could relocate in knowable surroundings. There was no equivalent core. The forces were different, the orders of response eluded us. Tenses and inflections. Truth was different, the spoken universe, and men with guns were everywhere.The one-sentence stories dealt with our passing grievances or small embarrassments. This was the humor of hidden fear.
