The Memory Stones

by Caroline Brothers

  ‘Of course you are welcome, more than welcome, to stay with us,’ Anastasia says. ‘I just hope your parents haven’t reported you missing to the police.’

  Ana shakes her head. ‘I left them a note,’ she says.

  ‘Saying?’

  ‘That I was going away. That they shouldn’t worry. That I love them.’

  Anastasia nods.

  ‘And now?’ she says after a pause. ‘Have you thought what might be the best thing to do?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Ana says. There is wretchedness in her voice. ‘I just want it all to go away.’

  Anastasia picks up the yellow ball and squeezes it, tossing it backwards and forwards as she thinks.

  ‘Ana,’ she says after a moment, ‘I don’t know much about your country. I have no idea about your family and I don’t know what happened when you were a child. But it seems to me that if the judge says there has been a denunciation, then someone must be looking for you. Or for someone they think is you.’

  Ana groans. ‘Perhaps,’ she says. ‘But I don’t want to be found.’

  Anastasia searches her face. There is fear in it, and resistance like a wall. Suddenly she sees the extent of Ana’s disorientation, as if love, empathy, instinct, every point on her emotional compass, had lost alignment, that she no longer had her bearings, nor any place to land.

  Anastasia reaches over to her and folds her in an embrace.

  ‘There will be a solution, Ana,’ she says to her, not knowing how but repeating it and trusting it because she cannot think what else to believe.

  It is morning, and Anastasia and Vasilis are drinking coffee out on the terrace; Ana is floating in the sea. Eyes shut to the sun that is already blinding, she is a creature neither of land nor water, suspended under an aquamarine sky.

  Vasilis has found her an old pair of swimming goggles. They are cloudy with scratches but now, when she swims underwater, she can see.

  Beneath her, catching the sunlight, sand-glitter sparkles like Christmas. Sea urchins bristle like ordnance left over from the Second World War.

  Anastasia has told Vasilis what Ana has told her, about the crosses and the denunciation, about the things she has to decide. Now he is pondering the circumstances, trying to order the facts in his mind.

  ‘This is only the half of it – that’s my feeling,’ Vasilis tells her, toying with the base of a ceramic bowl that had broken in the kiln.

  ‘Half of it?’ she says.

  ‘Look, I’m not familiar with how justice works in Argentina, but it doesn’t seem to me as if it’s just some lawyer making a threat. It’s a judge, an investigating judge by the sound of it, and a judge wouldn’t call her in without good cause.’

  Anastasia weighs his words. There is more to it, she senses it too, though she doesn’t know what. She waits for him to go on.

  ‘What is she now . . . twenty-two, twenty-three?’ he says. ‘Which means she was born in . . . what? . . . seventy-seven or seventy-six. Wasn’t that the time of their Junta, not long after ours? It just makes me wonder, that’s all.’

  ‘Makes you wonder what?’

  ‘When there’s been a power grab it sets the tone, doesn’t it? It filters down that things are there for the taking, especially when you’re on the winning side. Does she really know who these people are, these parents she’s so concerned about? I’m just saying, it’s something to bear in mind.’

  ‘I don’t think she is questioning who they are – I don’t think she even accepts that she might be adopted. Why should she? The first she’d ever heard about it was from this judge, and clearly she’s suspicious of his motives. I think she just panicked and leaped on a plane.’

  But Vasilis’s mind is turning and he hardly hears.

  ‘Just supposing she is adopted, and they never got around to telling her. Well, why didn’t they? Isn’t that how it’s done these days? There’s no reason to keep it secret, especially once she’d become an adult.’

  ‘Oh, Vasilis, there could be any number of reasons. Perhaps they were intending to. Perhaps the longer they left it, the harder it got.’

  He shoots Anastasia a look over the top of his broken glasses. ‘Or – perhaps they had something to hide. Maybe it wasn’t actually an adoption,’ he continues. ‘Maybe it was something else.’

  ‘Such as?’

  ‘Kidnapping? I don’t know. Did they buy her? Was there some kind of theft? Those crosses, for example – if you thought your child was going to be stolen, wouldn’t you try to mark it in some way?’

  Anastasia looks at him. ‘That’s a bit of a leap, isn’t it?’

  ‘I’m not saying that’s what happened. Just that it might have. I wonder what this father of hers did during the regime.’

  ‘He’s in the military,’ Anastasia says. ‘She told us at Aigai that time.’

  Vasilis stares at her. ‘I’d forgotten that,’ he says. Then, anticipating her reaction, he adds: ‘Of course it might not mean anything. Or, on the contrary, it might mean quite a lot.’

  Anastasia tells him what Ana told her: that her father was still active, and wasn’t intending to retire for another two years.

  ‘Which must put him roughly in his early sixties,’ Vasilis says. He does a swift calculation. ‘So, back in the nineteen seventies – mid-career.’

  Anastasia fires him a warning glance. ‘Beware of conspiracy theories, Vasilis,’ she says. ‘Ana’s got enough on her mind.’

  She goes to finish her coffee but finds it’s cold, and shivers despite the heat building into the day. She looks out beyond the terrace to where Ana has started swimming, clean strokes shattering the glassy sea.

  Let her swim, she thinks. Let her stay in the sun. Let her get strong.

  Ana has just refilled the enamel basin with the hose beside the bamboo when Anastasia wanders up from the beach. After siesta, she is planning to go to a village beyond the headland and wonders if Ana would like to come for the walk.

  ‘It’ll be dry in half an hour in this heat,’ Anastasia observes, as Ana pegs her spare dress to the line. The teenage tabby scutters sideways as the drips patter onto the ground.

  Ana is washing her clothes in the garden. The water, dazzling in the brightness, is scalding for the first few moments where the hose has lain in the sun.

  This mention of another village makes Ana nervous. There are stretches of time when the world still feels opaque to her, when her mind turns inward to what feels like empty space. Then, this place is enough for her: the terrace, her small white room, the narrowness of her days.

  Now, she feels confronted. She isn’t sure she is ready for the outside world.

  ‘It will take us about forty-five minutes,’ Anastasia is saying, ‘that’s if we go along the beach. I need to pick up a few provisions, and you might like to take a look in the shop.’

  ‘I don’t know, Anastasia . . .’

  ‘You don’t have to decide right now. Just think about it,’ she says. ‘It’d be nice to have your company. But see how you feel later on.’

  Ana’s tiredness is back and she just wants to sleep all afternoon. Yet she should go; she needs things . . . She thinks of the clothes she’s been borrowing, of half-a-dozen items she hasn’t brought.

  Anastasia goes crunching over the pebbles to the terrace, plucking a leaf from a basil plant by the back door.

  ‘If you come, we’ll take that dog,’ she calls back through the strings of seashells. ‘We might have to drag him along the beach, but it’s about time he went for a walk.’

  At the end of the second bay they come to a sailors’ chapel built on a low spit of rock. Ana attaches the Labrador to his lead, and his lead to a rusty water tap, where Anastasia orders him to stay sitting in emphatic Greek.

  A bouquet of herbs has been fastened over the doorframe. The door complains as they push it open and enter, waiting for their eyesight to adjust. The darkness is aromatic with pine needles and incense, and the metallic odour of silver tarnishing in the damp sea air.
/>   Anastasia inhales deeply and turns to Ana. ‘Do you smell it?’ she says. ‘It’s only like this by the sea.’

  Ana, taking in the arches and the darkened murals, the elongated eyes of the saints on the iconostasis, breathes in the scent and nods.

  A thicket of candles emerges from the sand in a filigree holder, some of them burned down to the quick. Aslant, the icons watch as Anastasia drops some coins into a moneybox and selects a couple of tapers from a tray. Asking Ana to hold them, she fills the air with phosphorous as she finally succeeds in lighting them with matches the humidity has turned soft.

  ‘That one’s for you,’ Anastasia says, taking the other candle from her hand. Ana, surprised, looks up in thanks, and cups the flame that flickers in a current of air. Then after a moment, she places the taper next to Anastasia’s in the sand.

  Later, where the rocks become impassable, they join the road for a little way, passing a dusty taverna half-hidden in a depression among the pines. The Labrador barks at the pelican that sometimes visits their beachfront; it stares and yawns obscenely from where it is standing guard.

  The shop lies beyond the taverna, above a sandy beach beside a cluster of holiday homes. Among the inflatable rings and light bulbs, Ana rummages for her size in flip-flops, then goes through the underwear box. She adds toiletries and a sundress that she tries on behind a curtain, heaping them in a pile by the till.

  She has just enough money for everything, including the chickpeas and the detergent for Anastasia, despite Anastasia’s determination to pay.

  ‘Let me, please,’ says Ana, her hand on Anastasia’s forearm. ‘I’m imposing enough as it is.’

  Anastasia frowns her disagreement, but Ana has already handed across the notes.

  The Labrador’s claws click like backgammon counters on the concrete as he goes to anoint the signposts and the trees. Down on the beach, Ana frees him to investigate clumps of seaweed and lumber up to his haunches into the sea.

  Two old men are drinking ouzo at the taverna when they pass it. The pelican has shifted his vigil to the kitchen door.

  On the last stretch of beach, Anastasia shakes back her hair, lets the sun warm the lids of her eyes. She had wanted to give Ana the chance to talk some more if she’d felt like it, but instead she has been quiet again, still troubled, on their walk.

  Anastasia looks over to where she is trailing through the shallows, her patterned dress hitched up with a purple scarf. The bag of supplies she purchased in the village swings beside her, in low arcs over the water, almost grazing the tops of the waves.

  5

  Mexico City

  July 1999

  I move mechanically through the arc of my days. I pare my life back to routine and adhere to it, its automatisms sustaining me rather than the other way around. What weighs on me is this waiting, which I worry is not waiting at all but something inconclusive that each day further abrades my shored-up hopes.

  Where is she? The question churns through my sleep, it harries my waking hours.

  In response comes only silence. To still my thoughts, I divide my life into practical tasks and dissect them into their smallest constituent parts.

  I wake early and lie there listening to Daniela’s breathing, trying not to disturb her before her working day begins. Restless, I rise half an hour before she does, and after my shower dress quietly in the bathroom, then go out into the still-fresh morning to bring home the bread that she likes. I arrange the cups and bowls on the breakfast table, and have the coffee waiting by the time she has dried her hair.

  Later, when she has gone out to tape an interview, I sort through the bills and paperwork, then try to focus on reading or a lecture I have to prepare.

  Sometimes I meet Hugo for lunch and he tells me about his family, about Nicolás, still living at home, still trying to find a job. Sometimes we talk about Mexican politics; there is an election coming and Hugo, ever the journalist, is excited. He hasn’t ruled out, after seven decades, the chance of a change of regime.

  ‘We are living in historical times, my friend,’ he tells me, eyes sparkling behind thick new spectacles, fingers drumming on Formica or wood.

  I shake my head. ‘When have we not?’ I say.

  I listen, I go through the motions of enthusiasm as he pours another shot of tequila into the blue lip of my glass.

  Daniela is worried about me, I know that. She has sent me back to the doctor, who has sent me again for testing. Each time they find nothing to report.

  Lethargy seeps into my limbs. My spirits drag behind me like a stone.

  I cannot get beyond it: how close we came; how deep the silence since.

  If only, after those long months preparing our case with Teodoro, we’d asked an intermediary – Patricia, perhaps, or one of the other Grandmothers – to break it to Liliana gently. We should never have confronted her directly with the law.

  She must be so angry. The thought of it is more than I can bear.

  That is what consumes me as I cross the square, barely noticing the shoeshine stands or the fruit vendors with their cups of thick-sliced mango, chilli powder speckling the flesh like rust.

  I am not ready. I am not yet able to accept that we have lost her, though everything tells me I should.

  I turn in circles, knowing but disbelieving, unwilling to begin the letting go.

  6

  The Aegean

  July 1999

  ‘Ana, come and look at this,’ Anastasia says.

  Ana is leafing through a book on the Santorini frescoes. In Anastasia’s study, the cube window is deepening to violet; the nightfall wind is flustering over the water, restless as it always is around dusk.

  Anastasia flicks through the files on her computer. She has something she’s been wanting to show Ana for a while now but has hesitated, not certain if it was yet the right time. Now, her screen fills with a single photograph, a vessel filled with dirt and the threads of roots and flashes of something luminous, the distinctive colour of gold.

  ‘What is it?’ Ana says.

  ‘We discovered it at Aigai last year.’ Anastasia pulls up the next frame. ‘Now,’ she says, ‘do you see?’

  Ana gives a small gasp.

  ‘It’s exquisite, isn’t it?’ Anastasia says. ‘It’s like the one that Philip was buried with, only smaller – the same oak leaves, reserved for royal males.’

  ‘You found this at Aigai?’ Ana says. ‘I thought you’d finished excavating the royal tombs.’

  ‘It wasn’t in a royal tomb. It was Ioannis who found it – in the new trench we sank, a few feet across from where you and Dimitri used to work.’

  Ana colours slightly at the mention of Dimitri’s name.

  ‘I don’t understand,’ she says. ‘Were there tombs in the middle of the agora?’

  She can picture the scene so clearly: the smell of freshly turned earth, the wheelbarrow tracks across soil newly stippled with footprints, and old Ioannis in the midst of it, hands knotted over his shovel like rope.

  ‘No, that’s just it. That’s why this discovery is so strange.’

  She calls up another photograph. Against the murk and decay and debris, Anastasia traces the edge of a golden leaf on the screen with the end of her pen.

  ‘It was buried in a ditch beside the sanctuary. This picture was taken the moment we opened it – the whole container was waterlogged, but you can see where the acorns are attached by their thin gold wires.’

  She shows Ana how the copper vessel was rusted through on the outside, while the golden one inside it remained fully intact. She explains how, when they unsealed it, the oak-leaf crown was sitting on a layer of ashes; how the finesse of its craftsmanship was typical of the Macedonian workshops, down to the veins in its crenellated leaves.

  Beneath the golden crown, they’d discovered fibres of purple fabric, and the golden discs that once had been sewn into it, found only in royal graves.

  Anastasia pauses for a moment, clicking through the photos on her screen. />
  ‘And beneath all that there was something else,’ she says, pulling up another shot. ‘They were all still there, all carefully placed. We found his cremated bones.’

  Ana blinks.

  ‘Do you know who it was?’ she says.

  ‘We sent the bones to the lab for testing, and the results are just starting to come in. From the size and formation of the pelvis in particular, they have concluded the body was that of an adolescent male, somewhere between fourteen and seventeen.’

  Ana breathes in sharply. It seems astounding to her that after two millennia, an age could be attributed with such precision.

  ‘Surely that narrows it down, then,’ Ana says. ‘There can’t have been too many Macedonian princes who died in adolescence at that time.’

  ‘It narrows it down, certainly. But there is only so much the lab can tell us. The pit debris gives us a rough idea of timescale. But neither can give us a name.’

  ‘Do you know how he died?’

  Anastasia shakes her head. ‘No, though there is a slim chance the lab will come up with something – which is why we haven’t yet publicised the find. There are still a few more tests they want to run.’

  The purple window has darkened now, turned the colour of Indian ink.

  ‘If he was a prince,’ Ana says, thinking aloud, ‘why wasn’t he buried with the rest of the royal family? Why did they go to all that trouble – the crown, the royal fabric, the whole cremation – if they were only going to bury him in a ditch?’

  ‘That is why it’s so puzzling,’ Anastasia says. She hesitates a moment. ‘To me, as an archaeologist, there is something almost disturbing about this find.’