The Names

an abandoned hole, swinging a railroad pick. The high sun funneled in on her, the wind passed over. Everyone else was in the olive grove, eating lunch in the shade. Her attitude was a precious dissonance, something as intimate, pure and unexpected as a moment from his own past, flaring in the mind. I picture him standing at the edge of the pit with a bath towel fastened at the waist, in torn tennis sneakers, breaking out in abandoned laughter, a sound that always struck me as a cue to some deep and complicated passion. Owen yielded himself completely to things.Sometimes we talked half the night. I felt these were useful hours beyond whatever rambling things we found to say. They gave Kathryn and me a chance to speak to each other, see each other, from either side of Owen's intervening position, in Owen's refracting light. They were his conversations really. It was mainly Owen who set the tone and traced the subject matter. This was important. What she and I needed was a way to be together without feeling there were issues we had to confront, the bloody leftovers of eleven years. We weren't the kind of people who have haggard dialogues on marriage. What dulling work, all ego, she would say. We needed a third voice, subjects remote from us. This is why I came to put a high practical value on those conversations. They allowed us to connect through the agency of this wan soul, Owen Brademas.But I don't want to surrender my text to analysis and reflection. 'Show us their faces, tell us what they said.' That's Owen too, Owen's voice coursing warmly through a half-dark room. Memory, solitude, obsession, death. Subjects remote, I thought.An old man came with breakfast. I took my coffee out to the small balcony and listened awhile to French voices on the other side of the partition. A white ship crossed in the distance.I saw Tap walking across the square to get me. Sometimes we walked to the site, going the first part of the way along a walled mule path humming with flies. The cab route was roundabout, a dirt road that skirted the higher parts of the island and never lost the sea. It was possible, if you looked to your left about halfway along the route, to get a distant glimpse of a white monastery that seemed to hang from the top of a rock column in the middle of the island.We decided to take the taxi. It was outside the hotel, where it always was, a grayish Mercedes that sagged badly. The roof light was busted and one of the fenders was orange. In ten minutes the driver turned up, sucking his gums. He opened the door. A man was lying across the back seat, asleep. We were all surprised. The driver shouted at the man to wake him up. Then he went through it again to get the man off the seat and out of the cab. He kept talking and shouting as the man wandered off.The taxi smelled of ouzo. We rolled down the windows and settled back. The driver headed along the harborfront, then turned up the last of the streets and went south. It wasn't until we'd been on the dirt road for five minutes that he said something about the sleeping man. The more he talked, the less irritated he became. As he unraveled the event and analyzed it, he began showing amusement. Whenever he paused to think back on it, he couldn't help laughing. The event was a funny one after all. He grew more animated and seemed to be relating another incident involving the same man. Tap and I looked at each other. By the time we got to the excavation we were all laughing. Tap was laughing so hard he opened the door and almost tumbled out of the car.There were eighteen trenches extending nearly to the water's edge. There was an old mining car on a track. Pottery fragments in labeled boxes were kept in a shack with a thatched roof. The watchman was gone but his tent remained.It was a dazed landscape. The sense of spent effort was almost total. What the scientists were leaving behind seemed older to me than what they'd found or hoped to find. The true city was these holes they'd dug, the empty tent. Nothing that was lodged in the scarps could seem more lost or forgotten than the rusted mining car that had once run dirt to the sea.The trench area overlapped an olive grove. Four trenches were in the grove, a head in a straw hat visible in one of them. From our elevated level we could see Kathryn closer to the water and in the sun, stooped over with a trowel. No one else was around. Tap walked on past her, giving a little wave, and went to the shack to wash pottery shards. The other thing he did was collect tools at the end of the day.Kathryn ducked out of sight and for a moment nothing moved in the dancing glare. Only light, sea dazzle, on the calm surface. I realized a mule was standing just inside the olive grove. All over the island donkeys and mules stood motionless, trick figures hidden in the trees. The air was still. I used to long for thunderstorms and bare-legged women. I was twenty-five before I realized stockings were sexy.The same white ship came into view.That night Owen played the recorder for ten or fifteen minutes, a small musing sound that floated over the dark streets. We sat outside the house on a small terrace that faced the wrong way. The sea was behind us, blocked by the house. Tap appeared in the window to tell us he might be going to bed soon. His mother wanted to know if this was a request for silence.'No, I like the recorder.”'I'm relieved and grateful,' Owen said. 'Sleep well. Pleasant dreams.”'Gobood nobight.”'Can you say it in Greek?' I said.'Greek-Ob or Greek-Greek?”'That might be interesting,' Kathryn said. 'Greek-Ob. I never thought of that.”Owen said to Tap, 'If your mother ever takes you to Crete, I know a place you might be interested in seeing. It's in the south-central part of the island, not far from Phaistos. There's a group of ruins scattered in the groves near a seventh-century basilica. The Italians excavated. They found Minoan figurines, which you already know about. And there are Greek and Roman ruins scattered all over. But the thing you might like best is the code of law. It's in a Dorian dialect and it's inscribed on a stone wall. I don't know if anyone's counted the words but they've counted the letters. Seventeen thousand. The law deals with criminal offenses, land rights and other things. But what's interesting is that the whole thing is written in a style called boustrophedon. One line is inscribed left to right, the next line right to left. As the ox turns. As the ox plows. This is what boustrophedon means. The entire code is done this way. It's easier to read than the system we use. You go across a line and then your eye just drops to the next line instead of darting way across the page. Might take some getting used to, of course. Fifth century b.c.”He talked slowly in a rich voice, lightly graveled, a regional chant of drawn-out vowel sounds and other ornaments. His voice carried drama in it, tuneful history. It was easy to understand how a nine-year-old might feel snug in such narrative rhythms.The village was quiet. When Tap turned out his bedside lamp the only visible light was the candle stub burning among our wine glasses and crusts of bread. I felt the day's glassy heat under my skin.'What are your plans?' I said to Owen.They both laughed.'I withdraw the question.”'I'm maneuvering long-distance,' he said. 'We may be able to finish the field season. After that, your guess is as good as mine.”'No plans to teach?”'I don't think I want to go back. Teach what? To whom?' He paused. 'I've come to think of Europe as a hardcover book, America as the paperback version.' Laughing, clasping his hands. 'I've given myself over to the stones, James. All I want to do is read the stones.”'Greek stones, I assume you mean.”'I've been sneaking up on the Mideast. And I'm teaching myself Sanskrit. There's a place in India I want to see. A kind of Sanskrit pavilion. Extensive inscriptions.”'What kind of book is India?”'Not a book at all, I suspect. That's what scares me.”'Everything scares you,' Kathryn said.'Masses of people scare me. Religion. People driven by the same powerful emotion. All that reverence, awe and dread. I'm a boy from the prairie.”'I'd like to go to Tinos sometime soon.”'Lord you're crazy,' he said. 'The Virgin's feast?”'Pilgrims by the thousands,' she said. 'Mostly women, I understand.”'Crawling on hands and knees.”'I didn't know that.”'Hands and knees,' he said. 'Also in stretchers, in wheelchairs, carrying canes, blind, bandaged, crippled, diseased, muttering.”She laughed, saying, 'I'd like to see it.”'I'd be inclined to give it a miss myself,' I said.'I'd really like to go. Things like that have great force, somehow. I imagine it must be beautiful.”'Don't expect to get anywhere near the place,' he told her. 'Every square foot is given over to crawling and supplication. Hotel space is nonexistent and the boats will be jam-packed.”'I know what disturbs you two. They're white people, they're Christians. It's not all that remote from your own experience.”'I have no experience,' I said.'You went to church.”'As a child.”'Doesn't that count? I'm only saying that's not the Ganges they're swarming into. On some level it touches you in disturbing ways.”'I can't agree,' Owen said. 'My own experience as a bystander, an occasional observer, is totally, totally different. Campus-brand Catholicism, for instance. Well-lighted space, bare altar, open faces, communal handshaking. None of these smoking lamps, these dark sinuous images. This is gilded theater, what we see here. We're almost off the map.”'You're not a Catholic,' I said.'No.”'What are you, what were you?”The question seemed to confuse him.'I had an odd upbringing. My people were devout in not very conventional ways, although I guess I'm obliged to think that convention depends on cultural surroundings.”Kathryn changed the subject for him.'Something I meant to tell you, Owen. About two weeks ago, a Saturday, remember we broke up early. Tap and I came back here, he took a nap, I lugged a chair up to the roof, sat drying my hair, going over notes. Nothing stirred down there. About ten minutes into my reading a man came out of the shadows somewhere in the lower village. He walked over to a motorcycle on the wharf. Crouched over it, inspecting this or that surface. Out of nowhere a second man showed up. Didn't even nod at the first man, didn't see him as far as I could tell. There was another motorcycle at the other end of the wharf. The second man stood straddling his bike. The first man moved into similar position. I could see both men, they couldn't see each other. They kick-started their bikes at the same instant, Owen, precisely, and went roaring off in opposite directions, up into the hills, two streams of dust. I'm convinced neither of them even heard the other.”'How lovely,' he said.'Then silence again. Two lines of dust vanishing in the air.”'You could see the event shaping itself.”'Yes, there was a tension. I saw the elements begin to