When she opened her eyes, George was already awake. He turned and smiled at her, then offered another massage.
“I must start drawing soon,” she said. “But let’s have some coffee.”
George offered to go out for fresh bread, but Rebecca said it would take too long.
He seemed dreamy and light. She even heard him laughing in the shower.
George stared at things in her kitchen, drinking his coffee slowly.
Rebecca held the front door open and wished him luck with his day. He waved again and stepped out backward. Then she took a long shower.
She spent the day making sketches and drinking chamomile tea. In the afternoon, she slipped from her clothes and worked in her underwear. When it became too hot, she turned the squeaking taps of the shower and waited a few moments before stepping in. There were cracks in the yellow wall, and water found and filled each one quickly—soaking the exposed cement that had dried in the darkness.
She slowly made everything cold.
Pellets of water broke the film of sweat on her body.
She let her mouth fill.
Rebecca’s grandmother had drowned one afternoon at the end of summer.
The lake wasn’t far from their house.
Rebecca’s mother had watched. She was only a child herself. She ran home and told her father. The back door swung open. His daughter couldn’t keep up and soon found herself all alone in the forest. She slowed to a walk. She was afraid. She started crying and then peed. Her legs stung. When she arrived at the lake, all she could see was a cool expanse of water. Then on the other side of the lake, perched on the grass—two bodies, one moving frantically—the other very still.
It was 1964. Rebecca’s mother was almost six years old.
A policeman sat with them at the kitchen table. He kept touching his belt. They drank tea.
His hat was on the table next to a currant cake.
“What will you do with her clothes?” the young gendarme asked. The clock in the hall ticked loudly as if trying to answer.
Then the policeman nodded at the little girl on the couch with her doll. “What are you going to do with her?”
Her father looked at his empty cup without saying anything. He hardly said anything ever again.
The policeman finished his tea and went home.
Rebecca’s hair was wet and heavy from the shower. Evening was falling over Athens.
Her drawings came to life in the dusk.
The city was cooling and traffic had thinned along the main avenue. Her neighbors hit spoons against pots. Someone was setting out plates. Children called in by a voice on the verge of anger.
She thought of George and their single night together.
She tried to imagine what he was thinking. The love of a man is like a drop of color into something clear.
When Rebecca worked for Air France, an old man once died in his seat.
Most of the other passengers were asleep. She noticed him because his eyes were open. She flipped through his passport. He wasn’t married. His shoes were nice. He also had a mole on his face. His watch was heavy and light gold. Its hands shone in the dark. There were people on the ground who thought he was alive.
Rebecca lived mostly in hotels. Sometimes she would lie in bed and look at her uniform laid out on the chair.
That’s me, she would think.
That’s who I am.
Chapter Five
George’s father ran away when George was about seven.
George had inherited his large jaw, which gave him the appearance of being more athletic than he was. Deep-set green eyes lingered in places where other eyes passed without feeling.
In the paradise of daydreams, George liked to think he was a reincarnation of Johann Sebastian Bach, who, like George, was famously unappreciated in his own lifetime, especially by his family.
George liked to stay up all night in the cafés of fashionable Kolonaki and read international newspapers. He sipped grainy Greek coffee and ate sticky baklava with a knife and fork. When no one was looking, he poured liquor into his coffee.
His chronic drinking began when he was fourteen, and inspired long walks through Portsmouth, New Hampshire, where he attended boarding school. It was a stark, gray town, with lingering fog at the windows of houses on the dock, the tall white nose of a town church illuminated against a white froth of sky.
Drinking gave George a sense of quiet happiness. It was something to look forward to. It allowed him to focus on the moment and think wild things he never would have thought while sober. When he was drunk, the past was a smoking ruin far away—something he could shrug off.
George attended the famous Exmouth Academy. The floors were always shiny. There were many other boys like him. They got along quite well. Anything edible sent from home was shared. They also loaned each other cushions and phone cards and had long group discussions after lights-out.
On Sunday, whole lines of boys could be seen trudging up the hill to church from the grounds of the school, like specters in their black capes. In summer they wore white button-down shirts, striped orange ties, brown blazers with white piping, brown shorts with brown socks. Chestnut oxford shoes were suggested but not required.
In the evening, they were free to watch television in the common area and eat a limited amount of candy.
Every Sunday, each boy had to write home. Here is a letter that George wrote home to his mother:
As George aged, his enthusiasm for the rigorous life at school began to wane. The other boys became mechanized versions of themselves. One boy jumped off the roof. The headmaster said he died on the way to hospital.
Unlike many of the boys whose teenage years drained them of the sweetness upon which they’d shared early happiness, George simply failed to harden to the idea that life is disappointing because:
i. People are motivated by vanity
ii. Life is over before you get to understand anything and so is probably meaningless
Instead, George became messy, emotional, careless, and weepy. His teachers in the upper school always seemed tired when they looked at him, and on several occasions they made sure the house staff confiscated his liquor without actually writing it up formally. When he threw up, younger boys could smell it in the hallway, and talked about it loudly at breakfast. Eventually one of the groundskeepers told George not to eat before or during his drinking sessions—at least as a way to control the odor.
Another way George escaped the circumstances of his loneliness was through music. He especially loved J. S. Bach. It was formal tenderness—love confined to structure. George played his music nonstop. There was so much to hear and he was never disappointed. George often bragged that Bach wrote so much in his own lifetime that if someone were employed full-time to copy out his entire library of work, it would take sixty-three years of labor just to copy the music from one page to another.
Bach also raised children. That was another reason George liked him. Unlike George’s own father, Johann Sebastian Bach didn’t run away from his son—even if he could only afford to give him two meals a day and a bed made of straw.
And then at fifteen, while other boys were swapping pictures of girls ripped from photography books in the library, or smoking in the orchard, George developed an obsessive love for language and classical history. His teachers’ faith in him was renewed, and their sudden avuncular affection somehow cemented his natural sweetness for good.
By his sixteenth birthday (which his mother forgot) George spent Sundays translating whole chapters of Latin into modern English. He also loved the old Greek stories of myths and gods. He liked to imagine all the characters dancing together on stage to some eighteenth-century organ piece by Bach. He even tried to make a small theater from cardboard, but abandoned the project when he glued his fingers together and had to spend a day with the school matron, who was once in the army and didn’t like classical music.
George was attracted to the Greek gods because no one believed in them anymore.
>
When Matron asked what he liked to do for fun, he went on about language. He told her that language owes its existence and identity to what it can never be, only to what it can point at. For the sound of language is the very embodiment of desire. And despite its greatest efforts, language is destined only to fail. Matron nodded and asked if he had been drinking.
“I won’t lie to you, Matron,” he said. “I have been.”
She shook her head in reproach. “Well, don’t let the masters catch you or I’ll be bandaging more than your hands.”
George loved every aspect of language. He loved to see it written, to hear it used, to feel its sounds in his mouth. What couldn’t be felt in real life could be felt through language—through the experience of another by the setting of marks upon a page. It was unthinkable, yet it worked.
“We have found a way to record . . .”
George had once begun one of his term papers.
“ . . . And for the past 5,000 years there has been a thread running through humanity keeping it together, so that we may know a person’s innermost feelings without ever having known them personally . . .”
Considering himself something of an expert, George liked to analyze the few letters his mother had written to him at the academy. They required careful examination, for in them (George had convinced himself) there was veiled love.
George’s parents were like a jigsaw puzzle that came without the parts he wanted most.
George sometimes took the afternoon off school. There was a churchyard overlooking the sea that he liked to sit in. His boarding school was set high on the edge of town, with fields that sloped to an apple orchard. Beyond the far wall of the orchard, where the older boys met local girls and lied to them, lay the churchyard and then the town of Portsmouth. Beyond that, unknown valleys and fields.
George loved sprinting through the orchard toward the far wall. In early autumn, sunlight fell golden through the trees. Once across the wall and through the field, he came upon the churchyard.
Even when George could see his own breath, the bright sun warmed the tops of graves, as if anointing each silent dweller. The flat graves were the oldest. Children’s headstones made the best seats. George liked to sit on them and smoke cigarettes. Sometimes he would chat to the child, and say things like, “Well, if you came to my school, you should take Miss Corday for French . . .”
The longer George sat on each headstone, the closer he felt to the child beneath him. His “best” friend in the churchyard had died in 1782. His gravestone read:
1778–1782
HERE LIES OUR SON,
TOM COPTHORNE
WHO DIED AGED FOUR YEARS,
EIGHT MONTHS, TWO WEEKS,
THREE DAYS, AND FOURTEEN HOURS.
EVERY MOMENT WITH HIM
WAS OUR HEAVEN ON EARTH.
George wondered if one day, somebody might count the minutes of his life.
Sometimes he stole a small carton of chocolate milk from the cafeteria and poured some into the ground for Tom.
Some of the flat tombstones had been split by weather. On another, time had erased whole sections of lettering. One gravestone was completely blank. George imagined it was his.
In summer, he lay in the dry grass without moving. The sun on his face like the hot cheek of a lover. His eyes closed to a glowing curtain of warm blood.
He wondered what his father was doing and blamed himself for his father’s departure when he was seven years old. He felt bonded to his mother by deficiency. Somehow, in a way he couldn’t understand, they had all failed as a family.
George once considered that his father was dead, and that his secret life overseas was a cover-up because George was somehow responsible for his death in a way he couldn’t remember. But the reality was probably that his father was happier without them, and if he had a son in Saudi Arabia where his oil company was based, then he was probably more intelligent, more handsome, and a bit taller than George. The truth about his father would have to wait until he showed up several years later.
George decided on Athens long before he actually went. It was a city he felt he knew intimately through the many texts he had translated.
As he neared graduation from Exmouth, George told his mother in a letter home how he planned to do his college degree in two years and then move to Athens to embark upon life as an archaeological linguist. George argued that archaeologists help modern cultures through what they expose with their excavations. He gave examples. Israel’s unwelcoming Negev Desert—a place where archaeologists uncovered the method by which the ancient Nabataean people had irrigated the land for crops two thousand years ago using the rain from cloudbursts through a system of irrigation channels and water cisterns. After this technology was relearned, life quickly returned to a place modern residents had found was beyond any type of cultivation.
Even more miraculous, George wrote in another letter, was how—after years of failed agricultural efforts four thousand meters up, in a lake region of Peru and Bolivia—archaeologists uncovered a technique that ancients had used to grow crops successfully on about two hundred thousand acres.
In the few letters his mother wrote back, she never once mentioned any of his historical stories. Instead she told him what she had eaten for breakfast, how the weather had ruined her plans, the state of the house, their lack of money, and that she dreaded her birthday. Once she said she was having minor surgery, and would be unable to write for three months and not to worry about her.
Between Exmouth and Athens, George went to a small liberal arts college, not far from his school. He lived in the dormitory known as Foxhole. He had a bed, a desk, a chair, a lamp, and a small bookshelf, which was stacked precariously with too many volumes.
He had a roommate from an island off Maine called Joshua, who wore a clear brace over his teeth and rode a 1950s bicycle.
On Saturday nights, George copied out whole sections of the Iliad and the Odyssey in ancient Greek. After his first English class, George gave the teacher a folder containing a few of his translations. The teacher was very old. He opened the folder, looked perplexed for a moment, and then said, “Jesus of Nazareth.”
During his freshman year, he stayed up for two days, listening to the Bach partitas over and over without headphones.
A week later George returned to his dorm to find his roommate’s cupboard empty and his bed stripped to a mattress. A note on George’s pillow said:
Dear George,
I’ve moved! But only a few doors down the hall if you ever need a friend . . .
Joshua B
George wrapped CDs of Bach’s French Suites into a little package with ribbon. Then he opened a bottle of gin and swigged from it several times before pouring some into a glass and mixing it with tonic water.
Then he took out a pad of paper and a pen.
He looked at his drink and then out the window—at the gently blowing tall trees that were all over campus. Then George carried the package down the hall and left it outside Joshua’s new door with a note that read:
When Johann Sebastian Bach was nine years old, he copied out an entire library of music. He sneaked out of his bedroom, went downstairs, quietly turned the metal circle that lifted the latch and worked quickly in a blaze of moonlight. The passions we cannot control are the ones that define us.
G.
A few nights after making love to Rebecca, George relived the experience in a café close to his apartment. He tried to remember every detail, things she said, what they had for dinner. He wanted a photograph of her or a lock of hair, some physical token to remind him of the night—something he could actually hold in his hand as proof that he’d finally done it, and was in love.
Chapter Six
The next day was Sunday. Rebecca woke up and took a shower. Then she tidied her studio. When everything was put away, she felt like going out and decided to visit the narrow lanes of the Monastiraki flea market. She picked out a pair of plain white pants, but nothing so tight as
to have Monastiraki’s thin-haired vendors barking at her to come over. She had outgrown the need to be admired by men she was not interested in.
The flea market attracted many different groups of people. The low working class who looked for things they could sell for a small profit. Bohemians (usually foreign) fascinated by the plethora of random objects and the cultural diaspora responsible for things like former Soviet Union military-issue binoculars (with a hammer and sickle hologram in the glass). Then there was the criminal element, who were omnipresent at most outdoor, public events in Athens, and who seemed interested only in looking about the crowd, as though picking out specific faces for their vicious fantasies.
For Rebecca, the most important member of the flea market community was the laturna man, a decrepit organ grinder with a music box on wheels from the 1850s. He would wheel his cart from corner to corner, stop, turn the organ wheel, and then sing. His voice was old and cracked, like the record embedded in his machine. To Rebecca, he was like some mythical figure from another time. And she found him beautiful without understanding anything that he said.
The heat on the Athens metro was dangerous. Old women fanned themselves with rolled-up newspapers. The seats were wooden and passengers faced one another across tables, as though seated for a meal that would never come.
She had eaten two croissants for breakfast, warmed on her patio in the sun. Then, barefoot, she drank ice-cold goat’s milk from a bowl, watching cars swerve around a dead dog.
She climbed the steps from the metro station to ground level past two grimy teenagers injecting heroin. Monastiraki was packed—mostly tourists who’d spilled over from the Plaka. There were also scores of pickpockets trailing American and German tourists who had strayed from their tour groups.
The alleys of Monastiraki were dark and hot. Vendors hung merchandise from every possible corner of the street. Small alleys led to stairs that opened upon rooms of French tableware, porcelain dolls, family photographs, a silver headlamp quietly unscrewed from a Rolls Royce Silver Ghost parked at the base of the Acropolis in 1937. There were other things too, with a more sinister past. One vendor had a stack of Nazi soldiers’ helmets with the letters SS painted on the side in gothic script, Nazi silverware, mugs of random bullets, knives, handcuffs, and old mouse traps rusted shut.
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