shade of the long afternoons. The choir loft extended across the back wall, the pews were narrow and hard. The minister gestured, sang and orated in the open promotional manner of a civic leader, sweat-stained and pink, a large man with white hair, booming by the river. Light fell across the pews with the mysterious softness of some remembered blessing, some serious happy glimpse of another world. It was a memory of light, a memory you could see in the present moment, feel in the warmth on your hands, it was light too dense to be an immediate account of things, it carried history in it, it was light filtered through dusty time. Christ Jesus was the double-edged name, half militant, half loving, that made people feel so good. The minister's wife talked to him often, a narrow woman with freckled hands.When things went bad and they moved to the tallgrass prairie, his parents joined a pentecostal church. There was nothing safe about this church. It was old, plain, set in the middle of nowhere, it leaked in wet weather, let in everything but light. A congregation of poor people and most of them spoke in tongues. This was an awesome thing to see and hear. His father fell away to some distant place, his mother clapped and wept. People's voices variously hummed and racketed, a hobbling chant, a search for melody and breath, bodies rising, attempts to heal a brokenness. Closed eyes, nodding heads. Standers and kneelers. The inside-outness of this sound, the tumbling out of found words, the arms raised, the tremble. What a strangeness to the boy in his lonely wanting, his need for safety and twice-seen light.'Did you speak also?' I said.His eyes in their familiar startledness, their soft awe, grew attentive now, as though he'd stopped to analyze what he was feeling and what it meant. No, he hadn't spoken. He'd never spoken. He didn't know the experience. Not that it was an experience confined to some narrow category, the rural poor, the dispossessed. Many kinds of people knew the experience. Dallas executives spoke in tongues in gospel meetings in the shimmering tinfoil Hyatt. Catholics knew the experience, and middle-class blacks of the charismatic renewal, and fellowships of Christian dentists. Imagine their surprise, these tax-paying people, he said, these veterans of patio barbecues, when they learned they were carriers of ecstasy.But there was no reason it had to be carried out in a religious context. It was a neutral experience. You learn it, he said, or fail to learn it. It is learned behavior, fabricated speech, meaningless speech. It is a life focus for depressed people, according to the clinical psychologists.He measured what he was saying like a man determined to be objective, someone utterly convinced of the soundness of a proposition but wondering in a distant way (or trying to remember). whether anything has been left out.'What is left, Owen?”'Ah. I ask myself.”'Where are you staying?”'Colleagues have given me a room at the American School. Do you know it?”'I live up the street.”'Then we'll see each other again. Good. I'll be here a week. Then I leave for Bombay, by freighter.”'So India is next.”'India.”'You told us once.”'India.”'Sanskrit.”'Sanskrit, Pali, Tamil, Oriya, Bengali, Telugu. It's crazy, James. Rock edicts in ancient languages. I'll see what I can before the money runs out or the rains come. When do the rains come?”'Another thing you told us, on one of those island nights. They're on the mainland. They're in the Peloponnese.”'A supposition.”'On some level you want other people involved in this, don't you? I'm not sure you're even conscious of it but you don't want to be alone in this. With Kathryn there was no chance-she was firm about keeping a distance. In my case there was only a token interest, conversation for its own sake. But with Volterra you found a willing listener, a willing participant in a sense. He showed no reluctance, no scruples about what they did. This is a man whose interest in things can be almost deadly. He wanted to know more, he wanted to find them. So you pointed him in a certain direction. I'm not sure it was the best or simplest direction. I suspect you wanted to keep the local group to yourself. You didn't exactly mislead Frank. You told him the truth, the partial truth. You sent him after a second or third group, whatever the correct number. What is the correct number?”'Most likely three. No more than four.”'One is in Greece.”'You're supposing,' he said.'One is in Jordan. One was in Syria-I don't know how long ago. Vosdanik mentioned Syria, he mentioned Jordan, he also told us about a cult murder in northern Iran. But it wasn't clear how many groups he was talking about.”'Forget it,' Owen said.'That's what I told Frank. Forget it.”They are engaged in a painstaking denial. We can see them as people intent on ritualizing a denial of our elemental nature. To eat, to expel waste, to sense things, to survive. To do what is necessary, to satisfy what is animal in us, to be organic, meat-eating, all blood-sense and digestion.Why would a denial of these things have to end in murder?We know we will die. This is our saving grace in a sense. No animal knows this but us. It is one of the things that sets us apart. It is our special sadness, this knowledge, and therefore a richness, a sanctification. The final denial of our base reality, in this schematic, is to produce a death. Here is the stark drama of our separateness. A needless death. A death by system, by machine- intellect.So we talked, so we argued, the anthropologist, the storyteller, the mad logician. Strange that when we saw each other again it would not be that week, in Athens, with only half a city block between us. Maybe all the talking had brought us closer to an understanding, a complicity, than we wanted to be.
In the light of a lowering sky the city is immediate and sculptured. None of summer's white palls, its failures of distance and perspective. There are shadow-angles, highlighted surfaces, areas of grayish arcs and washes. Laundry blows on rooftops and balconies. Against an urgent sky, with dull thunder pounding over the gulf, this washwork streaming in the wind can be an emblematic and touching thing. Always the laundry, always the lone old woman in black who keeps to a corner of the elevator, the bent woman in endless mourning. She disturbs the composure of the modern building with its intercom and carpeted lobby, its marble veneer.Some nights the wind never stops, beginning in a clean shrill pitch that broadens and deepens to a careless and suspenseful force, rattling shutters, knocking things off the balconies, creating a pause in one's mind, a waiting-for-the-full-force-to-hit. Inside the apartment, closet doors swing open, creak shut. The next day it's there again, a clatter in the alleys.A single cloud, low-lying, serpentine, clings to the long ridge of Hymettus. The mountain seems to collect weather, to give it a structure, an aspect beyond the physical, weather's menace, say, or the inner light of things. The sun and moon rise behind the mountain and in the last moments of certain days a lovely dying appears in the heights, a delivering into violet, burnt rose. The cloud is there now, a shaped thing, dense and white, concealing the radar that faces east.Girls wear toggle coats. In heavy rain there is flooding, people die. A certain kind of old man is seen in a black beret, hands folded behind him as he walks.Charles Maitland paid a visit, making a number of sound effects as he got out of his rubberized slicker. He walked to an armchair and sat down.'Time for my midnight cup of cocoa.”It was seven o'clock and he wanted a beer.'Where are your rugs?' he said.'I don't have any.”'Everyone in the area has rugs. We all have rugs. It's what we do, James. Buy rugs.”'I'm not interested in rugs. I'm not a rug person, as the Bordens would say.”'I was over there yesterday. They have some Turkomans and Baluchis, fresh from customs. Very nice indeed.”'Means nothing to me.”'Weaving districts are becoming inaccessible. Whole countries in fact. It's almost too late to go to the source. It is too late in many cases. They seem to go together, carpet-weaving and political instability.”We thought about this.'Or martial law and pregnant women,' I said.'Yes,' he said slowly, looking at me. 'Or gooey desserts and queues for petrol.”'Plastic sandals and public beheadings.”'Pious concern for the future of the Bedouins. What does that go with?”He sat forward now, turning the pages of a magazine on the coffee table. A sound of rain on the terrace rail.'Who is it, do you think?' I said. 'Is it the Greek? Eliades?”He looked at me sharply.'Just a guess,' I said. 'I noticed them at dinner that night.”'You noticed nothing. She would never give anyone cause to notice. Whatever she's doing, I promise you it's not being noticed.”'I know I shouldn't be bringing it up. I've no right. But it's been hanging in the air. Even your son makes reference. I don't want us to have to adopt a cryptic language or a way of avoiding each other's eyes.”'What Greek?' he said.'Eliades. The night David and Lindsay took their famous swim. Intense man, black beard.”'Who was he with?”'The German. There was a German. He was there to meet someone who never showed up. Someone David knows. Refrigeration systems.”'You saw nothing. I could never believe she gave anyone cause to notice.”'It's not what I saw. It's what I heard. She spoke to him in Greek.”I waited for him to tell me how stupid it was to believe this meant something. I felt stupid, saying it. But the sound of her voice, the way it fell, the way it became a sharing, a trust, drawing them away from the rest of us, the way it shaded toward a murmur-the moment haunted me, I think.Charles didn't tell me I was stupid. He sat quietly turning the pages, possibly thinking back to that night, trying to recollect. There were so many dinners, friends, transients, so many names and accents. I could see him try to construct a summer night around that single image, Lindsay standing on the beach, in half light, laughing. He couldn't connect it. One more sadness at the middle of things.'I went clean off the rails in Port Harcourt. She left me, you know.”'I know.”'There was no one else. Just left.”'She was lonely. What do you expect?”'The Greek,' he said, like a name mislaid. 'Was it in Tunis I met him? Did we see each other later at the airport, come back to Athens together? I took him home for a drink. We all sat around and talked. An acceptable scenario, wouldn't you say? I didn't see him again until the night you describe.”We went to a movie together, went to dinner, saw a man so fat he had to move sideways down a flight of steps. The wind kept me up that night until two or three, a steady noise, a rustling in the walls.When I walked into the lobby the next evening Niko was at the desk with his coffee cup and newspaper. His small daughter was in his lap and he had to keep shifting her to read the paper.Cold.Cold, I said.Rain.Small rain.I talked to the girl briefly, waiting for the elevator to descend. I said she had two shoes. One, two. I said her eyes
