The Memory Stones

by Caroline Brothers

  ‘It’s not that good – I’m making mistakes all the time,’ she says. ‘But in my school we started English early and I really loved it. Then later I had a great teacher, one of the nuns in fact, who lent me books – you know, poetry and things.’

  Feet luminous with dust, they scramble through the last of the bushes and emerge on the Aigai road; up ahead is the turn-off to the palace. The way is barred by a padlocked gate to which Dimitri produces a key.

  Ana stares as he inserts it into the lock.

  ‘Where did you get that?’ she says.

  ‘Connections,’ he says. ‘Follow me.’

  He hitches open the gate for them to slip through, then pulls it shut behind them, leaving the padlock swinging on its chain.

  Arm aloft like a scorpion, an earthmover is parked on one edge of the site. A giant elm overlooks the sleeping valley; at its foot, hessian bags for topsoil lie folded in stacks. Beyond the tree, looming out of the darkness, she sees the hull of the workshop where the archaeologists clean and record their finds.

  ‘Over here,’ says Dimitri. She turns and sees him leaning over a sheet of corrugated iron. ‘Can you grab the other end?’

  They drop it to one side with a violent clattering, then shift a second and a third. Beneath them, protected from the weather, Ana sees something mysterious, a square surrounding a circle that is marked by an elaborate border, and within it, a swirling design. She squats down to touch the surface. As fine as any painting, it’s a mosaic created from tens of thousands of minute river stones.

  Dimitri shines his flashlight towards the perimeter. In a wedge of colour, lotus blooms protrude from leaves and tendrils; an eight-petalled flower radiates from the centre with stamens picked out in slender lines.

  The lamplight plays into the corners. In each, there is an ethereal figure that Ana cannot initially make out. She looks closer, sees a flower that opens like a lily and then transforms itself into a woman, her robes tapering off in a flourish of elaborate scrolls.

  ‘It’s beautiful,’ she says, looking at the pearl-grey folds of clothing, the coral of her mouth and skirt.

  ‘I thought you’d like it,’ Dimitri says, treading on an acanthus flower.

  ‘You can’t walk on it!’ she says.

  ‘Why not?’ he says. ‘It’s a floor!’

  She stares at him.

  ‘Don’t worry, we won’t damage it. They’ve removed the plastic sheeting because the restoration is finished – every last pebble is locked in place.’

  Already he is covering the central motif with the blankets. Tendrils escape from under them like waves from beneath a raft.

  She steps gingerly onto a vine.

  ‘You see,’ he says. ‘It’s safe.’

  Cross-legged on the blanket, she feels the curve of the stones under the palm of her hand and is surprised to discover they’re still warm.

  Dimitri stretches out beside her and stares up at the blue-black sky.

  ‘Can you believe this was the largest building ever constructed in Classical Greece?’ he says. ‘It once had two storeys of colonnades; it was bigger than the Parthenon itself.’

  She gives him a sceptical look.

  ‘It’s true!’ he says. ‘You’d have been able to see it for miles. Maybe even from the sea – it’s receded now, but the Aegean was a whole lot closer in those days.’

  ‘People will try to overdo the neighbours,’ Ana says.

  ‘Outdo,’ he says with a smile. ‘You’re not wrong about that. Old Philip got the palace completed for his daughter’s wedding so he could impress all the foreign dignitaries he’d invited. Only then he got bumped off, at dawn down there in the theatre, in front of all his guests.’

  ‘And – don’t tell me: the wedding ceremony turned into a funeral ceremony, and then into a coronation ceremony, and the rest is inside the Great Tumulus.’

  ‘Okay, okay,’ he says, laughing. ‘I know I go on too much. Sometimes I can’t help it – I just love this place so much.’

  Ana stretches out beside him on the blankets on the palace floor. She lies among the flowers that Philip’s household must have gazed upon; stares up at what must be the same stars.

  ‘What do you think they used this room for?’ she says.

  ‘Banquets. It was one of the king’s dining halls, apparently. I bet he brought everyone in to show it off.’

  ‘He sounds a bit flashy, this Philip,’ Ana says.

  ‘I know – but what do you expect from a king?’

  The palace is on a plateau halfway up the hillside and the night unfolds above them, and falls away before them, across the plain to the out-of-sight sea. They lie with their dusty feet towards the mountain, facing away from the lights of the valley, and wait for the shooting stars.

  ‘Do we get to make a wish?’ she says.

  Warm in the windless night, Dimitri has rolled up his sweater and offers it to her now for a pillow. She takes it, conscious of how close he is in the shadow, his skin like some velvety substance against the pallor of his T-shirt in dark.

  ‘Not until you’ve seen three of them,’ he says.

  ‘I’m up to two already – I saw two of them back at the house.’

  Another light streaks across the startled sky.

  ‘Hey – no cheating,’ he says. ‘Sputniks and satellites don’t count.’

  ‘It wasn’t an Esputnik,’ she protests.

  ‘Say “Sputnik” again,’ he says, but she screws up her nose instead.

  They amuse themselves trying to identify the constellations, Dimitri making her laugh with his made-up names.

  Low on the horizon, a light flares and soars and is extinguished. Like a needle, another threads the stars along its arc. Then another, and another, some brighter, some mere pin-pricks that scratch the sky’s glass dome for less than a heartbeat before vanishing into the infinite dark.

  ‘What makes a shooting star shoot anyway?’ she says.

  ‘Like all stars, the prospect of an audience, wouldn’t you say?’

  ‘All these attention-seekers,’ she says. ‘I think I might go for a walk.’

  She raises her legs so that her clumpy boots are silhouetted against the sky.

  ‘Hey, wait for me,’ he says, sticking his legs up parallel to hers.

  ‘Hurry up, then,’ she says, then after a second: ‘Actually, I feel a bit dizzy up here.’

  ‘Just don’t look down. Keep your eye on the horizon. Like on a boat.’

  ‘Why, are we going somewhere?’ she says.

  ‘We’re there already: the Celestial Disco. Care for a twirl?’

  They try it for a bit but the music is lousy – too many wind chimes and bells.

  ‘Let’s get out of this dive,’ Dimitri says. ‘There’s got to be a tango club nearby.’

  ‘You dance tango?’ she says.

  ‘Of course not,’ he says. ‘I’m English. I thought you were the Argentine.’

  ‘I’ve never taken a tango lesson in my life.’

  ‘You mean you don’t have a licence? I don’t think my insurance will cover me . . .’

  ‘Then I’m afraid you’ll just have to wing it,’ she says, giving an airborne side-kick with her heel.

  ‘Steady on, I’m only a beginner,’ he says.

  ‘Then watch you don’t step on my toes.’

  She can feel the warmth of his skin where the hairs on their arms are touching; she is still laughing when he takes her by the hand.

  His fingers are wider than hers and the skin on them is roughened from the dig. She remembers his calluses from the day they met, when he introduced himself in the dimness of the upstairs hall.

  She leaves her hand in his, allowing it, wanting it, but knowing she cannot divide herself, nor hold at bay a growing sense of contradiction she has been trying to pretend isn’t there.

  She will have to tell him; she should have already told him; she is delaying the moment she has to tell him that someone is waiting for her back home.

  Th
e Persian silk tree casts odd shadows down the driveway from the single lamp illuminating the veranda, and the scent of jasmine carries faintly on the summer air. Things have changed subtly between them by the time they stumble past the damaged fig trees, and crunch up the drive and around the back of the house to the door with its ear-splitting creak.

  Dimitri is whispering to her in the hallway. The cavernous house is silent, the entire world asleep.

  She has told him about Lucas on the long walk back but it’s as if he hasn’t heard or doesn’t care.

  ‘We only have one life, Ana.’ He is leaning over her outside her doorway, one elbow propped against the wall. ‘We have this time, this moment. We do not always get another chance.’

  Everything in her is aware of him: the warmth of his body; the scent of him, of dust and sweat and cotton that has softened after drying in the sun.

  She isn’t good at this. She feels loyal to Lucas and wretched about it; she feels too torn to act upon her feelings; cannot decide what she will regret more later on.

  Yet Dimitri has unsettled her. She is not the sort of person who breaks her promises, she reminds herself; she had given her word to Lucas and meant to honour it; she’d been brought up never to waver when she should be loyal.

  Dimitri waits as she struggles with her confusion, her wanting and her sense of duty, her unreadiness to act.

  ‘Ana,’ he says, then pulls her towards him in a hug. She rests her weight against him, her head against the hardness of his chest.

  And after a moment she realises something that before she hadn’t sensed about him: that he would wait for her, that he would wait all the time that she needed, that he would wait for her for as long as it would take.

  She lets him kiss her, just once, on the threshold of the room that still feels to her, like the bed in which she is sleeping, like the view over the valley from her window, as if it is all in some way really his.

  At breakfast, when she comes downstairs for coffee in the watercolour morning, there are shadows around her eyes. She smiles at him, and hopes he cannot tell she hasn’t slept.

  10

  Mexico City

  November 1998

  Blink blink blink.

  The night is dark and the street outside is silent.

  It is a nondescript hour on the wrong side of midnight in Mexico City, when the last mariachis are trudging home and the first shift-workers are struggling into the day.

  If there are to be burglaries tonight and crimes of passion, they’ve been committed. If the dance floors of the salóns have promised romance, it’s all been found. It’s a lost hour when the clocks have slowed and time is fluid; when shapes are shifting and no one can be quite certain that they’ve seen what they’ve seen.

  It’s the hour of truth and the hour of reckoning. It’s the hour when luck is decided or luck runs out.

  Blink blink blink.

  Behind the door of a study in a second-floor apartment, it’s view obscured by the branches of a spreading jacaranda, the small red light on a fax machine is winking. It’s not an hour for sending or receiving faxes – unless they come by error, or from another time zone, or bring in information that cannot wait.

  Daniela finds the coversheet in the fax tray the next morning, with the law firm’s crest at the top of it and Teodoro’s corkscrew initials halfway down. Page one of three, it says, and she lifts it out and turns it over, but only a single page of it has arrived.

  It seems strange to her, because this machine has always printed backwards – its ‘special feature,’ the salesman said, was to finish with the coversheet on top. She opens the paper feeder to see if anything is concertinaed in its entrails, then flips it shut and gives it a thump in case something is stuck in its craw.

  When nothing happens she glances around the office; no sheets of paper have strayed onto the table or floor. She shrugs, and tosses the coversheet onto the pile for recycling, telling herself that it must have been sent by mistake.

  She is logging into her computer when from the corner of her eye she sees it: one, no, two sheets of paper that have glided half under the couch. She bends down to retrieve them, then steps into the light to read them. She needs only to skim the first line.

  ‘Osvaldo!’ she cries, dropping everything, bursting into the living room, spinning around, remembering, then leaning as far as possible through the window overlooking the street.

  ‘Osvaldo!’ she shouts at the top of her lungs, not caring who else in the neighbourhood might hear. ‘Osvaldo! Osvaldo! Come back!’

  FAX: Pages 2 / 3

  Buenos Aires, 21 Nov. 1998

  Est. Teodoro Bonifaccio,

  I am writing this letter to you, in confidence, in response to a notice I stumbled across some months ago inviting anyone with certain information to get in touch.

  What I am about to tell you has been weighing on me since January, when quite by chance I saw your ad in El Clarín. It brought to mind an incident that took place many years ago, perhaps fourteen if my memory serves me, and which troubled me not a little at the time. I had forgotten all about it in the interim – until I came across your advertisement, so I cut it out to think about what to do. Unfortunately, events in my own family diverted my attention, but it is those same events that are prompting me now to write.

  What I read in the paper was an appeal for help in finding a missing person. It concerned a girl born in 1977, and it mentioned the presence of some distinguishing marks located behind one of her ears.

  Back in the 1980s, my husband and I lived next door to a couple whose little girl used to climb the fence to come over and play with our boys. One day – I remember it quite vividly because of the scare it gave us – the kids were messing around in the swimming pool, smacking the waves with paddles while stirring up a whirlpool, when the girl was injured by a blow to her head.

  The wound was bleeding quite profusely when my husband – who God be thanked was passing and saw the accident happen – fished her out and brought her inside. We propped her up at the kitchen table, and I fetched a bottle of Mercurochrome and a bag of cotton-wool balls. When the bleeding stopped, I was relieved to see that the cut was not a deep one, but as I twisted back her hair to dress it, I remember getting a bit of a shock.

  Behind her right ear was a set of marks exactly like the ones you describe. They looked to me like scars in the form of crosses, dark pink and raised a little – and as the mother of boys, I am familiar with how scar tissue looks. When I remarked on it, however, the girl – who was still a little groggy – said it was simply a birthmark, which struck me initially as strange. Then I wondered whether she might have been a forceps delivery, and for some reason needed stitches, and might indeed have been marked like that at birth.

  Still, something left me uneasy, and I was tempted to raise the question with her mother. Her father, however, was some big shot in the military, and when I mentioned it to my husband he cautioned me against it, saying it would be more prudent not to get involved. This would have been early 1985 and the girl – her name was Ana – would have been about seven or eight years old at the time – an age not incompatible with that of the person you seek. After that we saw her a lot less frequently. Her parents were very protective, and I suspect that after this incident they ordered her to stay away. She was a sweet girl, however, and when she got a little older, she’d sometimes drop by after school to say hello.

  FAX: Page 3 / 3

  Her mother, Bettina, who was often unwell, had a thing about cultivating roses. I seem to remember she was into grafting – from time to time, if she was home alone, she would point out her successes over the fence.

  They were an odd couple in many ways. Victor was a singularly intense person, and though Ana completely doted on him, I never saw them together much as a family, and personally, I never felt comfortable when he was around. He ran some odd kind of antiques business besides his military position – Bettina said it was a project for when he retired. All I can say is
that he was well prepared, because he started it way back under the Junta. Ana often accompanied him there on Saturdays, and somehow he kept it going even after his car crash, which incapacitated him for the best part of a year.

  Around the time Ana turned sixteen, the family moved to a military apartment downtown. Ana came around to say goodbye to me and Paco – he’s my eldest – and Bettina left a forwarding address in case we got stuck with their mail. She also gave me their phone number – because of her husband’s position, she said, their details were never listed in the directory. I still have the slip of paper, which I actually found this morning, curled up in the paperclip jar.

  I must stress that I cannot be sure that this is the girl you are looking for, but I am including the contact details Bettina gave me should you wish to follow up.

  Late though it may seem, I’m writing to you now because, earlier this year, Paco was involved in a motorbike accident. Sitting beside him in the hospital with his body encased in plaster and cross-stitches above his eyebrow, I suddenly remembered Ana’s markings, and how uncomfortable they’d made me feel. And because we’d come so close to it, and I’d had plenty of time to consider it during my vigil at his bedside, I began to get some inkling of what it might mean to lose a child.

  I know nothing more of Ana’s family circumstances, though Bettina once confided that she couldn’t have children when I asked if she was planning any more. It never occurred to me to ask whether Ana had been adopted. Perhaps after all she was not.

  But if she were, and if your client is looking for a child who grew up with markings as odd as these ones, then perhaps this information will help.

  As I mentioned, I would be grateful if you would keep this letter confidential. I am, however, including a card with my telephone number should you wish to discuss it further. You will find Ana, Bettina and Victor Bielka’s details on the back.

  Yours sincerely,

  Adriana Martín

  Encl.

  11

  Buenos Aires

  December 1998

  A gossamer rain is falling over the night-time garden, invisible until it is caught in the kitchen light. Constanza doesn’t notice until she feels it on her face; when she goes indoors to find a coat, thousands of tiny beads of it sequin her silver hair.