The Names

tone, only, an undercurrent in the room. I was intent on asking my questions about hotels and maps.Was it English, possibly?No. Not English. I would have recognized English just from the tone, the particular quality of the noise.What did they look like, a general impression?They looked like people who came from nowhere. They'd escaped all the usual associations. They weren't Greek but what were they? In a sense they belonged to that worn-out cafe as much as any local idler does. They were in no hurry, I don't think, to find another place to sit, another place to live. They were people who found almost any place as good as almost any other. They didn't make distinctions.All this in a glance, a walk across the room?The feeling you get. I couldn't pick them out of a crowd of similar people, I don't know what they look like as individuals, but the general recognition, the awareness of some collective identity-yes, it's there at a glance.What were they wearing?I recall an old wasted aviator jacket on one man. Outer material peeling off. A hat, definitely. Someone wore a hat, a knitted skullcap, several dark colors, a circular pattern. I think the woman had a scarf and boots. I may have seen the boots when we drove past the cafe on our way out of town. Floor-to-ceiling windows.What else?Just an impression of old clothes, mixed things, some touches of brightness maybe, a sense of layers, whatever they could add on to keep warm.What else? Nothing.

In the morning, a couple of minutes out of town, I saw a dark shape come out of the scrub near the road, an instant with a speed and weight to it, something near the right front wheel, and I hit it, a dull sound trailing off behind us, and kept driving.'What was it?”'A dog,' he said.'I saw it too late. It ran right into us.”He said nothing.'Do you want to go back?”'What's the point?' he said.'Maybe it's not dead. We can find somewhere to take it.”'Where could we take it? What's the point? Let's keep driving. I want to drive. That's all.”The rain was a torrent now and people started coming out of the fields, people I hadn't known were there, mostly the old and very young, shrouded in coats and shawls, riding donkeys, walking head down, leaving on tractors, whole families on tractors with umbrellas and blankets and plastic sheeting held over them as they crowded between the massive tires, moving slowly toward home.

I sat in the office alone, sending telexes, doing numbers on the calculator. It seemed to me that ever since the first of those island nights I'd been engaged in an argument with Owen Brademas. I wasn't sure what the subject was exactly but felt for the first time a weakening in my position, a danger.I also felt I was ahead of myself, doing things that didn't correspond to some reasonable and familiar model. I would have to wait to understand.Why had I gone to the Mani, knowing they might be there, and why with Tap? Was he my safeguard, my escape?I read reports, drafted letters. Mrs. Helen arrived, chiding me for being in so early, for looking so worn-out. She went to the alcove to make tea, Zou Zou Bop Golden tea, which someone had brought back from Egypt.I worked until ten that night, enjoying it, finding a deep and steady pleasure in the paperwork, the details, the close-to-childlike play of the telex, of tapping out messages. Even putting my desk in order was a satisfaction and odd comfort. Neat stacks for a change. Labeled folders. Mrs. Helen had devised for herself an entire theology of neatness and decorum, with texts and punishments. I could understand, faintly.I went home and made soup. Tap had left his hat behind. I resolved to stop drinking, although I'd had only a couple of glasses of wine in the last week or so. It was a setting of limits I thought I needed. A firmness and clarity, a sense that I could define the shape of things.

Lindsay Whitman Keller, eating an olive.Voices around us, some vague occasion of the Mainland Bank, a suite at the Hilton. People stood with their hands in the air, eating, drinking, smoking, or they clutched their own elbows or engaged with others in prolonged and significant handshakes.'Is this an assigned duty?' I said.'Spouses have no rights. Good thing I have my teaching job.”'Good thing David's not a hard-liner.”'This one I had to attend. Something to do with the future of Turkey. Unofficially, of course.”'Has the bank decided to let them live?”'Banks plural.”'Even more ominous.”'What's your excuse?' she said.'Hard liquor. I've been working day and night and not minding at all. This worried me.”Two men seemed to be barking at each other but it was only laughter, a story about a plane skidding off a runway in Khartoum. The bank wives stood mainly in groups of three or four in their corporate aura, tolerant, durable, suffused with a light of middling privilege that was almost sensual in its effect, in the way that a woman's arrangements with a man are a worldly thing, bargained over and handled and full of knowingness. The forced suburbia of these women's lives, the clubby limits of the 1950s in some dead American pasturage, here was a dislocation with certain seductive attributes and balances. The duty-free car, the furlough allowance, the housing allowance, the living allowance, the education allowance, the tax equilization, the foreign assignment premium. Often the women stood with a man in attendance, a flawlessly groomed Pakistani or a Lebanese in a well-tailored suit. Bankers from poor countries dressed like military men. They looked alert and precise and slightly in pain and they spoke a brisk and assured English with a blend of shortened forms. JDs were Jordanian dinars, DJs were dinner jackets.David moved across the room in our direction. I asked Lindsay what it was about him that always gave me the impression he was pushing people out of the way. He fed his wife some cheese and took her drink.'Always near a woman,' he said to me, then turned to Lindsay. 'Not to be trusted, these men who talk to women.”'Tried to call you yesterday,' I said.'I was in Tunis.”'Are they killing Americans?”He wouldn't give the glass back to her.'Per capita GNP is the fifth largest in Africa. We love them. We want to throw some money at them.”I gestured around us.'Have you decided to let them live? The Turks? Or will you shut them down for ten or twenty years?”'I'll tell you what this is all about. It's about two kinds of discipline, two kinds of fundamentalism. You have Western banks on the one hand trying to demand austerity from a country like Turkey, a country like Zaire. Then you have OPEC at the other end preaching to the West about fuel consumption, our piggish habits, our self-indulgence and waste. The Calvinist banks, the Islamic oil producers. We're talking across each other to the deaf and the blind.”'I didn't know you saw yourself as a righteous force, a righteous presence.”'A voice in the wilderness. Want to fly to Frankfurt and watch the bowl games on TV?”'You're out of your mind.”'We can watch on a monitor at the Armed Forces studios. No problem. The bank will arrange.”'He's serious,' Lindsay said.'We're all serious,' he said. 'It's the start of a new decade. We're serious people and we want to do this thing.”'Let's have a quiet New Year's Eve,' she said, 'in that little French place up the street.”'We'll have a quiet New Year's Eve, then we'll all get on a plane to Frankfurt and watch the bowl games on TV. The Huskers go against Houston. I outright refuse to miss it.”Why was I so happy, standing in that mob of bodies? I would talk to the bank wives. I would talk to Vedat Nesin, one of the many Turks I met that year who had a name with interchangeable syllables. I would talk to a man from the IMF, an Irishman who complained that he kept walking into scenes of destruction and bloodshed that never got reported. In Bahrain he walked into a Shi'ite riot. In Istanbul he fled his hotel in a service elevator during a demonstration that no one knew was coming, that no one understood, that did not appear in local newspapers or anywhere else. It was as though the thing had never happened, as though the corridors hadn't filled with smoke and rampaging men. His fear was going undocumented in city after city. He was disturbed by the prospect that the riot or terrorist act which caused his death would not be covered by the media. The death itself seemed not so much to matter.I embraced the wives and looked into their eyes, studying for signs of restlessness, buried grudges against their husbands' way of life. These are things that lead to afternoons of thoughtful love. I spoke to a Kuwaiti about the grace and form of characters in Arabic, asking him to pronounce for me the letter jim. I told stories, drank bourbon, ate the snacks and tidbits. I listened to the voices.'You are lucky,' Vedat Nesin said. 'You are a target only outside your country. I am a target outside and inside. I am in the government. This makes me a marked man. Armenians outside, Turks inside. I go to Japan next week. This is a relatively safe place for a Turk. Very bad is Paris. Even worse is Beirut. The Secret Army is very active there. Every secret army in the world keeps a post office box in Beirut. I will eat this shrimp in garlic and butter. Later I will eat profiteroles in thick chocolate sauce. After Japan I go to Australia. This is a place that should be safe for a Turk. It is not.”

I started out at first light, stopping only once, below Tripolis, for something to eat, and the same bluish clouds were massed down the coast, over the bays and processional headlands, but it wasn't raining this time when I reached the spot where the rutted track bends its way up to the boulder and the towered village beyond. Signs of night were hours off.I drove slowly up the hill and left the car behind the large rock. Someone, using tar, had painted over the words we'd seen six days earlier, covered them completely. It was a level stretch to the village, sixty yards, and the sky was so low and close I felt I was walking into it, into sea mists and scattered light.Bags of cement on the ground, stacked crates of empty bottles. A woman in black sitting on a bench in an open area of mud and stones. She had a bony face framed in a head-cloth. One of her shoes was broken, split across the instep. I spoke a greeting, nodded toward the alley that led into the village proper, asking leave to enter in effect. She paid no attention and I didn't know if she'd even seen me.I followed the narrow unpaved passage. A millstone lay in the first ruined tower and there was cactus jutting out of other houses, stones packed solid in window slits and doorways. I kept walking into dead-ends, mud and rubble, weeds, prickly pear.There was scaffolding on a number of structures, surprisingly, and house numbers in red as well as surveyors' marks.I moved slowly, feeling a need to