Graffiti etched into the car’s dust-furred exterior reveals an ancient layer of bodywork that might once have been maroon. Inside, a shovel and an interesting piece of driftwood lie among yellowing newspapers, while dozens of tins of various sizes are arrayed along the back seat.
‘They’re those glazes,’ Vasilis says as Anastasia hugs him, one of her eyebrows raised.
Vasilis already knows Dimitri so Anastasia introduces him to Ana, who can tell she is going to like him right away. His curly hair is receding like scrub in the path of a sand dune, his eyes are permanently crinkled as if he’s just finished laughing, and the creases in his clothing are white with ceramic dust.
Arm in arm with Anastasia, he tells them about his journey from the island where he has a workshop, and he and Anastasia have a house. It had taken him a day longer than planned to get here because the ferry had broken down in one of the ports.
‘It is very beautiful on the island right now. You must come,’ he tells them. Ana has to listen closely; he speaks English more slowly than Anastasia does, but with an accent twice as heavy. ‘The beach is right there in front of the house and the water is really very perfect for swimming.’
‘Hey, don’t tempt away my workers, Vasilis,’ Anastasia says. ‘But seriously,’ she turns to them, ‘Dimitri, you know this already, but Ana, you too: both of you are welcome any time.’
In the late afternoon they sit at the table out on the terrace. The dig house changes character on the weekends, with most of the archaeologists heading down to Thessaloniki for a break.
‘So is she still forcing you to poke around in the dirt for broken pots when you could have any of the new ones I am making?’ says Vasilis, as Dimitri passes him a beer.
‘Actually, at the rate he destroys his work, his pots are not too different from the ones we’re digging up,’ Anastasia says.
‘Quality control,’ he says with a laugh. ‘I should make a donation of all my fragments to the cause.’
Vasilis explains how, long ago, he’d studied with a Japanese ceramicist who, at the end of the year, announced a special exercise: that they were to destroy all the objects they had made.
‘The thought of it was devastating,’ Vasilis says. ‘Smashing up things for which we felt a little proud. But in a strange way, once we’d done it, we felt – how do you say? – liberation. His idea was to be teaching us humility. He wanted us to be seeking perfection, but not to be caring so much about material things.’
‘Even though you were trying to perfect material things,’ Ana says.
‘How can I explain?’ Vasilis says. ‘He wanted us to take the lessons he taught us deeply inside of us, and not to stop with the objects we had made. And perhaps he was also wanting to teach us, in such a way like this, that nothing lasts. No matter how beautiful it is.’
‘At least nothing but the debris and the ruins,’ says Anastasia. ‘Fortunately for archaeology.’
‘I don’t know if I could do that,’ says Ana. ‘It seems like such a brutal way to learn.’
‘Perhaps that’s the point,’ says Dimitri. ‘That story reminds me of something one of the diggers told me last year . . . You remember Niko, Anastasia? He’d just finished his military service.’
Dimitri is sitting sideways, his bare feet propped on the rung of Ana’s chair. Ana thinks in an absent way how tanned and square they are, how much she likes their shape.
‘Yes, of course,’ says Anastasia. ‘I invited him back, but he’d lined up some job in the islands this year.’
‘Well, he had this grisly story about a military academy, some place in America,’ Dimitri says. ‘They made the cadets who were training there adopt an animal for a pet. It could be any animal they wanted – a kitten or a puppy, a hamster, anything. They had to look after it for a year, and at the end of it, all of a sudden, they were ordered to kill it. In any way they chose.’
Ana recoils. ‘That’s horrible,’ she says.
‘The idea was to toughen them up for the deeds of war.’
‘My father’s in the military and I’ve never heard of that sort of thing,’ Ana says. ‘Can you imagine what that would do to you?’
‘I guess that’s why,’ he says.
‘Yes, but you’d stop being human.’
‘I’m not saying your dad is like that. But what do we civilians know? Maybe soldiers have to know they can do that sort of thing if they want that sort of career.’
‘Or maybe such a career is attracting people who already know they can do it,’ says Vasilis. ‘Certain types of personality . . . But in any case, I think that story’s apocryphal.’
‘What makes you say that?’ says Dimitri.
‘In Japan I heard something nearly the same. We were talking one time about the military tradition of seppuku, and then somebody mentioned the same story as you told, only it was in the country of Saudi Arabia. I think it’s one of those myths that endures a lot because they are possibly so believable. But to say frankly, I can’t imagine military academies having much room for pets. Animals, they are too anarchic. As well, they try to escape.’
As he speaks, a memory suddenly wells up in Ana’s mind: fur like graphite mink, oversize violet eyes. The kamikaze kitten that her father once brought home for her, in spite of her mother’s allergy to cats. The kitten she had adored with the full force of her eight-year-old’s heart, the kitten that had suddenly disappeared.
‘Ana, stop your wailing. These things happen in order to toughen us,’ her father had growled, his anger halting her in her stride. He had never spoken to her like that before, never threatened her before with his hand. Weakness, she was learning now, was what he hated most in life; she must never cry, never show distress.
Anastasia puts down her glass. ‘What a grim discussion for so glorious an evening,’ she says. ‘I’m going to make some mint tea, if anyone wants some. We’ve got a whole lot of it growing outside.’
‘I’ll go,’ says Ana, jumping up.
She feels disturbed by the turn of the conversation, all this talk about the destruction of living things. She wants to stand in quietness for a moment, by the laurel tree in the stillness of the herb garden, breathing in the pungent scent of leaves.
After dinner they stay up late, finishing a bottle of wine that Vasilis remembered he had left in the boot of his car. There is a picture of a Santorini fresco on the label: renditions of lilies on a Minoan wall preserved for three millennia under ash.
They update Vasilis on the dig-house gossip, and how the museum is shaping up. Anastasia and Dimitri argue back and forth over who must have occupied one of the tombs. Though they are speaking English for her sake, Ana drifts in and out of their arguments until they agree to a truce.
The grapevine casts odd shadows over their faces in the light from an upstairs window; it is still hot enough to sit out in short sleeves. Above the trellis, over the brow of the hill, a shooting star darts and expires.
Dimitri sees it too, his eyes afire from all the sparring.
‘This is the best time of year for spotting them,’ he says. ‘In fact, there’s a great place for watching them back up the hill, if anyone’s in the mood for a walk.’
Vasilis and Anastasia decide to turn in, but Dimitri is already reaching for a flashlight and struggling with the blankets that are tumbling out of the cupboard in the hall.
Though he never specifically asked her, and she never really responded, Ana, who is wide-awake and restless, has been drawn into his orbit and is following as a matter of course.
‘You’ll need proper shoes for the shortcut,’ he tells her in the hallway. ‘We’ll go along the road for some of the way, but for the rest, it’s just a rough track.’
She goes upstairs to find a sweater, and jimmies her feet into her boots. Puffs of dust erupt like tiny smoke signals as she yanks the laces tight.
The night is still outside the dig house and the jasmine wall exhales its force field of scent. In the yard, the Persian silk tree strokes the air w
ith its tassels while the angel’s trumpets, unscrolling whitely in the darkness, calibrate their radar to the sky.
Serenaded by insomniac dogs, they crunch down the drive and along the road that is white in the airless night. Ana switches on the flashlight when they reach the path, which veers off at an angle into the scrub.
Blackberries snatch at the blankets Dimitri is carrying over his shoulder. Roses shake their rosehips at them like the knuckles of cranky old men.
Ahead of them on the hillside, a pair of symmetrical pine trees stands like a folded cut-out against the sky. The moon when it finally rises is a fingernail sliver above them, which Dimitri says is perfect since it won’t outshine the stars.
‘That was a blue moon we had at the end of July, old Ioannis tells me,’ he says. ‘Hard to believe there’s been three full moons since June.’
‘Why do they call it “blue”?’ Ana says. ‘In Spanish we say the same thing.’
He shrugs. ‘It’s probably one of those expressions that have been around so long that nobody remembers any more.’
‘Like living in a village called Palatitsia without realising there was once a palace up on the hill.’
He smiles. ‘That’s pretty much it,’ he says.
‘It’s strange, though, isn’t it,’ she says, ‘how we’re always losing our connections to the origins of things.’
‘Which I suppose is why we’re up here digging. To try to get some of them back.’
They walk single-file along the path that follows the contour of the hill, then rises steeply towards its crest. Near the top she stumbles and he throws out a hand to steady her; she sees the muscles in his forearm flex as he grasps her arm for a second before letting it go.
Where the path widens they walk side by side, making it easier to talk. He asks her about Argentina, and how it happened that a girl from the pampas had landed in northern Greece. She protests that she’s not a gaucha but a city girl, even if she’s not too bad at riding. She tells him about her life in Buenos Aires, about a trip she once made to a cave in Patagonia, about the awe that she sometimes feels around ancient things.
‘I’ve felt that too,’ he says, and Ana shoots him a glance, not sure if he is mocking her again.
He stops walking. The moon slips higher, thin as a paper crease. Yet his eyes seem to pick up the light from somewhere; she catches their shine in the dark.
‘The first time we opened a grave it was overwhelming,’ he tells her, and she realises he isn’t teasing after all. ‘It was an Iron-Age one . . . you know, those enormous jar graves, where they placed the whole body inside. You could see the drinking cups, the earthenware pots laid out in a row by the family, the necklaces that had disintegrated into lines of beads.’
The air is motionless; a moth crashes into his side and flutters away.
‘I wasn’t prepared for it, for that sense,’ he searches for the word, ‘of intimacy. It was very humbling, like glimpsing the truth of something that’s small and private, tender even, but at the same time immense and profound.’
He looks at her, earnest and then self-conscious at his earnestness, then shakes the hair out of his eyes. ‘That must sound a bit crazy,’ he says.
‘No,’ she says. ‘I’d love to see something like that.’ She has never even seen a tomb being opened but she can imagine it; she thinks she understands.
‘It just gives you perspective on things,’ he says. ‘Maybe it’s obvious, I don’t know. It was as if I’d suddenly understood some fundamental fact about being human. That this is what we do, what each generation does for the one that goes before it – this need we have to lay the dead to rest.’
She nods. She remembers the funeral they’d had for her Polish grandmother; how her mother had wept, though it wasn’t her mother who had passed away; how her father had managed to get through the day dry-eyed.
Dimitri follows her where the path turns level, chatting as they walk. He tells her he is half English and was born in London, but that all the summers of his childhood were spent in Greece. He tells her he has two brothers and a sister, that he is the eldest child. He tells her that his mother’s family had had to move to England during the time of the Colonels, and that’s where his parents met.
‘What colonels?’ Ana says.
‘You know, the dictatorship. Back in the sixties.’
Ana is silent. She wonders if their dictatorship was anything like Argentina’s, if there’d been terrorists and subversives here, too.
‘What about your family? Do you have brothers and sisters?’ he says.
She shakes her head. ‘There’s only me,’ she says.
‘So how did your parents get together?’
It takes her a moment to recall their story: the military connections in her mother’s family, her father introduced to her mother by a mutual friend.
‘It must have been weird growing up in a military family . . .’ he says.
‘Do you think so? I don’t have much to compare it with.’
‘Well, they must have been pretty strict with you as a kid.’
‘I don’t know – they didn’t send me on forced marches or anything,’ she says with a laugh. ‘But I suppose they were strict in some ways. Convent school. Plenty of nuns, not a lot of discos. If I went to a party they had to talk to the parents first, and my father always picked me up at ten.’
‘At ten! Didn’t that drive you mad as a teenager?’
She shrugs. ‘Perhaps it should have. But as an only child I was always pretty close to them. At one point I nearly lost my father in an accident – his car ended up wrapped around a tree after some guy sped into him at an intersection – and for whole chunks of my childhood my mother was pretty unwell. I never wanted to do anything to upset them, and, especially when I was smaller, I was always wanting my father to be proud.’
Dimitri takes that in. ‘And I suppose they are pretty conservative – church, politics and all that,’ he says.
‘Church – that was mainly when I was younger, though we still had plenty of it at school. As for politics, my father doesn’t believe in all that human rights stuff, if that’s what you mean – not after what the terrorists tried to do.’
‘Which terrorists?’
‘You know, the ones who tried to turn Argentina over to the communists. Like Che Guevara in Cuba – he was an Argentine, you know. In the seventies and eighties there were subversives like him all over Argentina, hidden within the general population. My father was on the side of rooting them out.’
‘So he’s a bit of a hero, your dad.’ He says it neutrally, sending her a sideways glance.
‘I’ve always looked up to him, I suppose.’
‘And what about you, what do you think?’ he says.
‘About what?’
‘About politics.’
‘Well, I’m not all that political. But of course I’m against things like Communism and Socialism. And though I don’t like everything about Menem, I admire him for pardoning the generals after the dictatorship, instead of punishing them for doing their job.’
There is a crumbling wall and they scramble over it, careful on the wobbling stones. Dimitri gives her his hand and changes the subject when they land on the other side.
‘It’s odd, it’s as if for half of my childhood I didn’t really have a mother,’ says Ana. ‘When I was small we used to do things together – silly things, like painting our toenails and looking at magazines, and sometimes she’d plait my hair. Then – it’s as if there were a gap for quite a few years.’
‘A gap?’
‘Until my father’s accident. I mean, my mother was around all that time, of course, but she spent weeks on end in bed. Then, one day soon after his car crash, she seemed to just snap out of it. He took ages recovering in hospital, so it was just her and me, and we grew a lot closer then.’
‘How old were you at the time?’
‘Oh, about fourteen. It began when my mother was given some tickets to the opera, so we went t
o see Madama Butterfly. Then on Sundays we started going to movie matinees – we went quite a lot . . . I began to understand her a little bit more.’
‘Understand her?’
‘You know, why she was always so unwell . . . I started thinking. Once, when I was about ten, we were working in the garden, and she came out with this extraordinary thing.’ Ana pauses. ‘She said that I’d had an elder brother. That he’d arrived prematurely and had died shortly after he was born.’
‘They’d never told you before?’
Ana shakes her head. ‘I don’t suppose they had any reason to. But it rocked me, somehow, as if they’d been keeping some big secret from me. I suppose after bugging them for so long about wanting a little sister, I’d grown used to thinking of myself as the only one.’
They’d stopped walking so he could hear her finish her story.
‘Are there secrets in your family?’ she says, looking up at him.
‘If there are, then I don’t know them – which doesn’t mean there aren’t any – just that they’re very well kept.’
‘Which I suppose is the whole point of secrets,’ she says.
‘Except that eventually they tend to slip out.’
She trips on a rock but catches herself, and where the path narrows they continue in Indian file.
‘So why are you called Dimitri?’ she says. ‘Are you named after anybody in particular?’
‘My grandfather, as it happens, though I never knew him. He died in the war.’
‘I’m sorry,’ Ana says.
He nods. ‘What about you?’ he adds after a moment. ‘Is Ana a big family name?’
‘Actually it’s Ana Lucia,’ she says, ‘but nobody calls me that. In fact, when I was small I wanted to be called Liliana – and don’t ask me where that idea came from – it’s not as if we knew anyone by that name. Apparently I kept insisting, but people kept forgetting, so that finally when I was given a baby doll, I gave her the name instead.’
He holds back a spiny bush to help her get past.
‘And how did you learn to speak such good English?’ he says.
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