‘Is that how long you are staying?’ she says, in the summer heat unable to imagine how this country could ever be cold.
‘I might have to,’ he says. ‘It depends how my fieldwork goes.’
She wants to ask what he is researching, but he has hoisted her backpack onto his shoulder before she can formulate the phrase.
‘Come on,’ he says. ‘You must be shattered. I’ll show you which one’s your room.’
‘Eshattered?’ she says.
He looks at her with a semi-amused expression on his face. ‘You know. Knackered. Bushed. Done in.’
She nods, not sure whether he is mocking her, and follows him up a staircase and along a corridor that is dark after the brilliance outside. As her eyes adjust, she notices the loose swing of his hips, the muscles working in the backs of his calves.
He sets her pack down against the wall of her room. A sliver of light pierces the shuttered windows, shoots like an arrow across the floor.
‘There you go,’ he says. Twin holes peep at her like a snakebite from under the arm of his T-shirt, revealing the sudden intimacy of brown skin. ‘There are showers at the end of the hallway, and there’s an outside one behind the bamboo fence that’s just beyond the terrace, if you want to relax a bit.’
‘I might just sleep for an hour,’ she says.
‘Sure, this is a good room for sleeping.’ His eyes sweep over the wooden wardrobe, the mirror by the window, the bed pushed up against the wall. ‘This was my room last year.’
Ana finds herself blushing for no reason as she steps back to let him pass. Then he pivots on the threshold, remembering he has forgotten to ask her name.
‘Ana. From Argentina,’ she says, grateful for the gloom of the hall.
‘Dimitri-from-England,’ he says, and thrusts out a hand whose calluses scratch her a little, like bark. ‘Welcome to Antiquity,’ he adds, doing a half-bow with his palm on his belly. ‘If there’s anything you need, don’t hesitate . . . We wish you a pleasant stay in the royal city of Aigai.’
He shoots her a smile that illuminates the hallway like a flashlight and leaves her seeing doubles of him before she realises he is no longer there.
She is turning into her room when she hears his voice again, calling up from the bottom of the stairs. ‘I forgot to say, Stella has dinner ready by eight, and we have beers beforehand, whenever people wander in.’
She calls down her thanks, and closes the door. She leans her forehead against it for some moments, exhausted by the journey and all the things she has seen and smelled and heard and is still absorbing, still blinking his silhouette from her eyes.
7
Aigai, Greece
July 1997
The sun pounds the back of her head through the hat that Stella had found for her, on a peg behind the villa’s back door. Ana finds the light here overwhelming, sometimes even in the early morning; as the sun cranks higher, the air itself seems to split into shards of white.
After the one day Anastasia insisted she spend acclimatising, Ana now rises with the workmen in the still cool light of dawn. Though she has never been good at getting up early, here she finds she can do so without an alarm clock if she sleeps with the shutters open, letting the lightening sky and the distant roosters ease her with less violence into the day.
Once she is awake, she pads down to the kitchen and boils the water for coffee that she has learned how to make the Greek way, poured over a jug of grounds. She drinks it out on the veranda, watching the valley awaken with her arms folded into her windcheater as the colour creeps into the hills.
Although their numbers fluctuate, roughly a dozen archaeologists are staying at the dig house, and one by one they shuffle downstairs, yawning and rubbing their eyes.
Ana catches a lift with the first of them and by seven she is out at the site. Old Ioannis and the other workmen, who cross the village on scooters untroubled by mufflers, are always there before them, leaning on their spades and smoking while they wait for instructions to start.
Anastasia has assigned Ana to the new trench they have opened in the agora. The red tips of the survey pegs that mark out its perimeter make it look like a circus has decamped, or is about to arrive.
‘Trust them,’ Anastasia tells her, nodding towards the labourers who have set to work in the herringbone tracks that the earthmover has left in the dirt. ‘No archaeologist will ever know this soil as well as they do. They are farming people. They have worked it all their lives.’
She asks Ana to shadow Dimitri since he is an English-speaker, and as a graduate student he is experienced enough to teach her the techniques she will need.
Her day is spent sifting through layers of dirt where the topsoil has been wheelbarrowed away. Dimitri explains to her about stratification, about cuts and backfill and edges, and the best technique for brandishing a pointing trowel.
He is patient with her questions, and does sketches to clarify issues of context and record, tearing pages from the notebook that he keeps in the pocket on his thigh. Her bedside drawer in the dig house, where she keeps her silver bangles, soon fills with his biro-scribbled thoughts.
She stops to stretch her back, and looks out over the burial ground where unknowing farmers for centuries have been ploughing and reaping the fields. The sun dyes the blond grasses pink in the long light of morning, then peroxides them white as it climbs.
After the first week she feels as if the trench has etched itself into her body; in bed at night, she can identify its angles like a ghost in the ache of her limbs. Her socks leave a lasso of dust about her ankles and her cuticles are inked with blackness that no amount of scrubbing will remove. Only after she peers down the table at lunchtime, and sees the same circular tattoos on everyone’s fingernails, does she change her mind and wear them like a badge of belonging.
She veers between exhaustion and exhilaration. Every fragment they find, every chunk of masonry no matter how scattered and broken, has a context, is a part of a sentence they are striving to construct. After the abstractions of her law books, she loves the jigsaw-feel of piecing together a mystery, of starting the day not knowing what she’ll know by the end.
She has begun sketching their finds and discovers she has some talent for it. Perhaps, she thinks, this path could lead to a place worth going to, as if the road she was on beforehand were somehow out of kilter with who she was.
And always at 2.30 p.m., when the screech of cicadas is deafening and the heat-warp makes it impossible to continue, they call it a day and head back to the villa for lunch.
People converge from all over the dig site, from the palace and the agora and the tombs. They rinse off the soil at the sink under the wall of jasmine; they flick water at each other like school kids; they jostle for chairs at the table under the ripening grapes. In her apron with its one torn pocket, Stella darts among them, passing around trays of meat or fish or vegetables she has baked or fried or grilled. To Ana, sitting at one end of the table, they could be a crew on the set of a film.
It is only when she glances up and catches Dimitri watching her that Ana realises he’s been observing her from afar. She has been sawing through the suckers of octopi, decapitating sardines that the fish van brought that morning to the village, piling Olympic rings of onion on the side of her plate. He catches her eye with an amused smile and she blushes, to her own annoyance, when she is handed a rosy-cheeked peach.
After lunch she pointedly ignores him, skipping coffee and vanishing upstairs. Through the shutters, Ana can hear the clickety-click of backgammon being played down on the veranda, cicadas applauding dementedly in the heat.
In the shade of her room she peers at her face in the mirror. Even despite the dimness she seems altered, though she cannot describe in what way. Would Lucas be able to identify it? she wonders. Would he see more clearly than she can whatever it is that has changed?
When she thinks about him, now they’re apart, what comes to her is mostly an impression, like a photograph taken in
close-up because she couldn’t stand back far enough to see. She misses him, and the missing tugs like a knot between her belly and her heart. But when she tries to picture him at a distance – across a room, say, or walking towards her over the lawns at the Tennis Club – she cannot seem to get him into focus. It’s as if the rapport she has with him is intimate, or exists not at all.
She is tired, she tells herself; the sun out on the dig today was scorching; it is rest she wants, not thought. But when she kicks off her boots and stretches out on the bed that was once Dimitri’s, it is Dimitri’s smile that troubles her siesta sleep.
Anastasia comes over to them during the morning, when they are clearing a new foundation in the top trench, and asks Dimitri if he can spare his new assistant for an hour.
She turns to Ana, who squints up at her in the sunshine and pushes the hair out of her eyes. ‘They’ve finished cleaning the mural in the tomb I told you about. I wondered if you wanted to come and see.’
Ana is already out of the trench and laying down her trowel on the table where they annotate their finds.
Anastasia shoots a quick smile at Dimitri. ‘Well, I gather that’s a yes,’ she says.
They drive the short distance to Vergina and park beside the restoration workshops where Anastasia has her office, close to the royal tombs. Once the archaeologists had finished their excavations, they’d rebuilt the hill over a concrete dome where the museum was now taking shape.
Anastasia rummages in her desk for a flashlight, then they are waiting outside in the sunshine for the guard to unlock a door into the side of the hill. A tremor runs through Ana when he opens it; she sees a passage sloping downwards into the darkness, like a journey into the underworld itself.
‘Ready?’ Anastasia says. ‘You shouldn’t find it too claustrophobic, but they are still fixing the wiring, so it’s going to be pretty dark.’
Ana finds herself speaking in a whisper, and finally not speaking at all. The darkness inside is absolute; they have taken a bifurcation that has obscured the light of the entrance, and no sound penetrates this deep from the world outside.
They follow Anastasia’s cone of light that loses intensity as it jumps along the walls. It is cool inside, and smells of silicon and earthiness where the new construction meets the old stone and the soil.
Anastasia leads them down the turnings that they take from the museum’s entrance as if she could do it without a flashlight at all.
Jumbled slabs of limestone rear into view and vanish, then the base of a shrine, ruined when it was plundered, that had yielded the marble paw of a lion. Then they are climbing a staircase up the side of a wall and peering over the top of it, between a parting in two mighty beams of stone.
Ana isn’t sure what she’d been expecting, but it was nothing as drama-filled as this. From one surface, the wheels of a chariot seem to be flying towards them. Grappling with the reins in one hand, a wild-haired man is gripping a near-naked woman who is trying to break free from his grasp. Thunderbolts descend beside a second man who is racing ahead of the horses, while in the background a maiden crouches, one hand held above her like a shield.
‘Do you recognise it?’ says Anastasia. ‘It’s the abduction of Persephone.’
Ana takes in the vibrant colours: the reds and yellows and purples against the chalk-white surface, a frieze of flowers in a faded blue suspended over a blood-red wall.
‘And the man with the horses?’ she says, peering through the discolouration on the mural’s left-hand side.
‘Hermes, the messenger who accompanied the dead to the afterlife, leading Hades’ chariot to the west.’
The torchlight plays around the chamber. Depicted in ashen tones on the adjoining wall, a woman huddles on a lonely rock, facing the abduction scene.
‘That’s Demeter on the left,’ says Anastasia. ‘The artist portrayed her not as a goddess but as a solitary mourner, bereft at the loss of her child.’
There are what look like three other figures on the opposite wall – the Fates perhaps – but the plasterwork is too damaged to be sure.
The frescoes flicker in the torchlight. Here in the subterranean darkness, this talk of the Underworld, of beliefs already ancient when they were adopted in archaic times . . . Ana shivers. She has that sense again of knowledge shimmering somewhere in the distance, tantalising but always out of reach.
‘Come on,’ Anastasia says after a moment. ‘There’s something I want to show you before we go.’
They descend the steps and enter the chamber and gaze at the paintings close up.
‘See where the artist did his sketches?’ Anastasia says. She points to the confident arcs, the fluent lines that Ana sees are not lines at all, but incisions made directly into the plaster. ‘He mapped it all out while the surface was wet, then adapted his brushstrokes as he went.’
Ana sees, and understands what she is seeing. Right here, just as in the cave in Patagonia, the trace of a hand on a surface, a long-vanished artist at work.
‘Are there any hypotheses about who it was built for?’ she says. ‘It has a feminine feel to it, wouldn’t you say? All these women on the walls.’
Anastasia nods. ‘It was looted in antiquity – when we opened it up, we found the bones had been scattered over the floor. The forensic lab tests showed that they belonged to a young woman and her new-born infant. She was in her mid-twenties and must have died with the baby, shortly after giving birth.’
Her mid-twenties, Ana thinks, and pauses. Hardly any older than herself.
‘Nikesipolis – that’s who we think it is. She was Philip’s fifth wife.’
They stand in silence for a moment, watching the torchlight play over the eastern wall. Demeter, the grieving mother, looks down at them from the lilies and the hyacinths and the griffins adorning the frieze at her feet.
Ana considers her for some moments: a love so fierce it stopped the earth from flowering, anguish and tenacity entwined.
In the quietness, she glances over towards Anastasia and is startled. In the gleam of the flashlight, just for a second, her eyes look like they’re glistening with tears.
But suddenly the beam is dancing around Ana’s ankles, illuminating the chamber entrance, the path to the outside world.
‘Ready to go?’ Anastasia says.
They turn the final corner. An oblong of daylight beckons from the end of the passageway: a mosaic of luminous emerald, a lapis-lazuli sky.
Seconds later they are bursting through it, out into the midday heat. After the coolness underground, after the darkness of the tombs, they are hungry for it, for children shouting and insects buzzing and seedpods cracking open in the sunshine, for the scent of herbs and ripening plums and the summer air caressing their skin like fur.
Two days later, Dimitri, who is taking the measurements of what may have been a kind of storehouse, turns to ask for Ana’s help. Shovel propped against her hip, she has her back to him and her arms in the air as she struggles to twist her hair into a knot.
‘What’s that, Ana?’ he says.
She half-turns towards him, elbows raised, trying not to let the shovel slide.
‘What’s what?’ she says.
He is squinting at her in the brightness, looking at the right side of her head.
Her hand follows his gaze and goes to the spot behind her ear reflexively, as if she were only now discovering it herself.
‘Oh, that’s nothing, I’ve had them forever,’ she says. Her fingers flit over the markings, the ridges hard as Braille.
Her unruly hair, grown to her great frustration even curlier in the heat, falls back from where she is winding it as she darts to catch the spade.
‘Three in a row like that. Those little crosses. You’d almost say they were scars.’
‘They’re not scars, they just look like scars,’ she says, her voice a little sharper than she’d meant.
He raises an eyebrow as she digs in the shovel that stands like a punctuation mark in the dirt.
&n
bsp; ‘What can I say?’ she adds, softening her tone. ‘I’ve always had them. They’ve been there since I was born.’
‘So what are they?’
‘Oh, just some sort of birthmark apparently,’ she says, hearing even as she says it a certain lack of logic in her words.
‘Hmm,’ says Dimitri. He is about to add something, then changes his mind and presses the end of the tape measure into her hand.
‘Can you hold it down for me?’ he says, indicating the length of a line of stone. ‘Take it as far as it will go to the end.’
She pins it to the earth where he has asked her and waits for him to note the distance down. A grasshopper catapults onto the toe of her boot, then catapults off into the weeds.
‘Maybe you had stitches,’ he says after a moment.
Her mind has drifted and it takes her a second to realise he’s still talking about her marks. It’s not as if she ever really thinks about them, though over the years she has tried to catch a glimpse of them with an awkward alignment of mirrors over the bathroom sink.
‘Estitches?’ she says. ‘As in an operation?’
He smiles. ‘Why not?’ he says. ‘Maybe they planted a chip.’
‘I suppose that would explain the exceptional brain power. I’d always wondered,’ she says.
‘Or . . . perhaps you played noughts and crosses in the womb.’ He extends the stripe of yellow centimetres and backs further down the trench. ‘It can get boring, I understand, hanging around waiting to be born.’
‘Are you accusing me of cheating? Of stashing a few spare crosses behind my ear?’ She holds her end of the measure in place and feels it pull taut again.
‘Lucky for you it wasn’t Scrabble,’ he says.
‘I don’t know. Aren’t X’s worth a lot of Escrabble points?’
‘Say “Scrabble” again,’ he says.
She blushes and screws up her nose at him. He is always teasing her for the way she pronounces words that begin with an ‘S’.
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