‘Disturbing – in what way?’ Ana says.
‘A rogue burial of a royal male – of all places in Aigai, the ceremonial capital with its huge necropolis . . . It makes no sense, when you think how organised their cemeteries were and how sophisticated their funeral rites. Yet there wasn’t even a stele to mark the place.’
‘So – do you think the vessel was stolen?’
‘A robbery? No; the crown would have been the first thing to go. And there was no evidence of any displacement in the strata, suggesting there was no later attempt to dig it up. I can’t help wondering whether there was some reason he had to be buried discreetly. Or indeed, whether it was a burial at all.’
‘What else could it be?’ says Ana.
‘Concealment. Removal, perhaps, from an original site for its own protection . . .’
In a flash Ana sees where this might be leading.
‘Like the ransacked grave at the front of the royal cluster?’ Ana remembers passing it by torchlight, its façade looming like a temple out of the darkness, when Anastasia took her to see Persephone’s tomb.
‘For instance.’
Ana is already imagining it: barbarians, despoiling the grave, attacked by loyal Macedons who had rescued the vessel and hidden it, perhaps before fleeing themselves.
‘It’s only one hypothesis, and perhaps not even that, just speculation,’ says Anastasia. ‘At the very least the dates would have to square up. And tomorrow might produce some other find that makes us jettison that entire line of thought.’
‘But surely . . .’
Anastasia interrupts. ‘You’ll be interested to know that there is another hypothesis about this crown, even if some consider it far-fetched.’
Ana looks up, intrigued.
The most obvious candidate, Anastasia tells her, is Alexander IV – the son of Alexander the Great, who was murdered along with his mother at around the age of fourteen. But his remains, most archaeologists concur, have already been discovered, in the unlooted tomb beside Philip’s.
Ana knows about this second grave: oak-leaf too, the golden crown around the silver urn that held the prince’s bones.
‘Well there was, by some accounts, another son.’
On his military campaign eastward, Anastasia tells her, Alexander was believed to have fathered a child by a Persian, a noblewoman called Barsine who, when she’d lived in exile, had been one of his childhood friends. The boy, who grew up with his mother, was said to have been named Heracles; he would have been Alexander’s eldest child.
‘During the power struggles that took place after Alexander’s death,’ Anastasia continues, ‘Heracles was said to have been mentioned as a potential successor – alarming a man called Cassander, who had designs of his own on the throne. By one report – and there is only one, recounted by a much-later historian – Cassander sent orders for Barsine and Heracles to be killed and privately buried. He wanted no state funeral. The idea was to have them quietly disappear.’
Anastasia pauses. ‘Heracles would have been seventeen at the time. And that has led some to speculate that these may be his bones.’
Ana looks at her. ‘And that this is Heracles’s crown.’
Anastasia nods.
‘I hasten to add that there are a great many problems with this hypothesis,’ she says, ‘first and foremost being our uncertainty as to whether Heracles was fictional or real.’
She runs through the counterarguments. Ana listens, and weighs them: against the age of the bones, the anonymous grave, the oak-leaf crown with the purple shroud denoting a royal male.
How young he was, she thinks. To put a name to the crown, to the bones it wreathed . . . She hadn’t expected this field to become so personal, to acquire so intimate a feel.
‘As an hypothesis, it seems to fit,’ Ana says.
‘Which is half the attraction, of course. But you know we need more than that. Some corroborative text, some confirmation. It’s not enough, a single account written several centuries after the fact.’
‘But you have the material evidence,’ says Ana, surprised by her own vehemence. ‘You have all the material evidence you could possibly wish for. How can that not be enough?’
‘Yet it isn’t, not now, not today,’ says Anastasia. ‘We need some other element that takes us, if not beyond all doubt, then closer to reasonable supposition.’
She sighs, and picks up a shard of pottery from her desk.
‘All we have, Ana, are these random fragments that the earth yields up to us from time to time – each one meaningless on its own. As archaeologists, our job is to establish their context, to find the links between them and improve our techniques for reading them – not seize upon the first explanation that appeals. On the contrary, we have to be most sceptical of the hypotheses we hold most dear.’
‘But how can we ever hope to state one fact with any conviction? There isn’t going to be convenient corroborative evidence all of the time.’
‘No, not even most of the time. So all we can do is dismantle, reassess and build on what others have deduced before us, and the most we can hope for at the end of it is to lay one tiny pebble on top of the cairn.’
‘That someone may come along and demolish.’
‘And that’s the way it should be, Ana,’ says Anastasia. ‘When new facts rise to the surface. When new tools refine our understanding. When new relationships are found.’
Later, sitting alone on the beach as the waves caress the darkness, Ana thinks about the crown.
Something about it moved her. Its beauty, certainly. How delicate it was. Its mystery.
A murdered youth in an unmarked grave, in a place where nobody could mourn.
She jolts awake in the night.
Outside her upstairs window, the sea is milky with moonlight.
Something has haunted her sleep. Not a dream as such. A bass chord still sounding after the melody has faded. A feeling that has lingered from the day.
Something Anastasia had said. A word that the judge had used.
Disappear. Disappearance. Disappeared.
7
The Aegean
July 1999
They were all murdered, she reads later on.
Two days later Ana is lying in a hammock rigged up between the terrace and the pines. She has cleared away the dishes and helped wash the plates from lunchtime, the forks with one prong lifted, the knives with mismatched curlicues on their ends.
Vasilis is in the kiln room tossing out the pots whose glazes have buckled, salvaging those that have come out intact. Still limping, the cat that has adopted him ties knots around his ankles in flashes of black and white.
Ana has found a book about Alexander in English and is reading it in borrowed sunglasses in the garden, its spine propped up on her chest.
At Aigai she’d learned what had happened to Alexander’s father; she’d stood in the very theatre where Philip’s assassins had struck. It’s what happened to the rest of his family for which she is unprepared.
Also murdered in the two decades after Alexander’s death were his mother, three of his siblings, both his wives, his son, and if the account that survives is reliable, his mistress and his firstborn, Heracles.
A fourth sibling – his half-sister, Thessalonike – died later, she discovers, murdered by one of her own sons.
Ana has had no idea. Assassination, matricide, infanticide, homicide, forced suicide: it’s all there, she thinks, all the permutations. A dynasty that violence stalked.
She lies the book down, gazes out over the tranquil sea. Beside her, a bee turns in panicked spirals, then lands on the stalk of a wild flower that should but doesn’t bend beneath its weight.
She cannot take the measure of it. The ruthlessness of such deeds.
She picks up the book again.
Shortly before Alexander lay dying in Babylon, a messenger set off from Macedonia. Cassander, she reads, had known Alexander from boyhood; the two had studied with Aristotle in Pella. Cassande
r’s father, furthermore, was a general so loyal to Philip that Alexander in turn had made him regent when he set off on his battles in the east.
It is no longer known what news Cassander was bringing to Alexander, what message his father had sent. Ravaged by grief or battle wounds, by typhus or perhaps malaria, Alexander had only a few days to live. There in Babylon, on a July day in 323 BC, he finally succumbed to his fevers, poisoned perhaps by the hellebore plant that may have been prescribed as a cure.
Cassander saw his opportunity. Yet it would take him eighteen more years to usurp the throne; twenty-two before he felt himself secure. The murder of three of Alexander’s closest relatives lay before him; Barsine and Heracles would make it five.
Only Thessalonike was spared. Cassander took her for his wife, fathered her sons and eventually made her Queen of Macedonia. She outlived Alexander by twenty-eight years.
Ana pauses. Thessalonike. In Aigai, Ana had stood in what they believed was the tomb of her mother. She had marvelled at the painting of Persephone that had decorated its long-buried walls.
Cassander, as it happened, had only eight years to enjoy the power he had so relentlessly craved. Within three years of his death, Macedonia would slip between the fingers of his children and Thessalonike would be murdered in their feud.
A speedboat emerges from behind the headland. Its pale wash lingers behind it like a jet stream on the surface of the sea.
Ana is remembering the palace at Aigai, the mosaic floor with its tendrils and lotus-flower women. She remembers the theatre terraces, hunched under their blanket of grass. She remembers the sanctuary where she and Dimitri were digging, and Demeter’s lonely vigil, and all the tombs asleep under the feathery blond fields.
It was a coveted kingdom, she sees that. And covetousness had soaked its soil in blood.
The oak-leaf crown shimmers in her mind like an apparition. What chance would Heracles have stood? she says to herself.
A wreath like that.
You could crush it under one foot.
8
The Aegean
July 1999
At the far end of the beach is a half-sunken jetty where the old men occasionally go to fish. It is late morning when Ana finds herself walking towards it and, drawn to some disturbance in the water, goes to the spot where earlier in the day a fisherman had been casting his line.
Something is bobbing about in the brightness. She stares at it, leans out over the railing, tries to make out what it is.
Trailing a streamer of pinkness, its glass eye fixed on a passing aeroplane, a decapitated fish head grimaces and laps at the waves. What looked like a single creature she now sees is a mass of minnows; the surrounding water is boiling with gobbling mouths.
Ana stands for a while and watches it, fascinated and at the same time repulsed. Then abruptly she turns her back and walks across the shingle, sits in the shade of an upturned boat.
Her back to the hull, she goes over the things in her mind that are certain.
She has parents she loves.
Without a test there is no proof she is adopted.
There is no need for anything to change.
These, she tells herself, are the facts.
What she hadn’t been counting on are the doubts.
Despite herself, despite the depth of her reluctance, she is sifting her memory for lies.
‘Mamá, where do babies come from?’
‘You know where babies come from, darling. They come from their mamá’s tummy.’
‘And how do they get inside?’
‘That’s God’s decision, darling. He’s the one who decides.’
‘What was it like when I was in there?’
‘Well, you kicked a lot to show you wanted to come out.’
‘Did it hurt when I kicked?’
‘Babies only kick gently, darling. Luckily they aren’t born with any boots.’
‘Mamá?’
‘Yes, mi corazón.’
‘When can I have a baby sister?’
‘Oh, darling, why do you want a baby sister?’
‘Magali has one. So does Rodrigo.’
‘Well, you don’t have to do everything the same as them.’
‘But I want one, Mamá. Magali says that hers sleeps in the cot she used to sleep in, and now they both sleep together in Magali’s room.’
‘That’s nice, darling. Now pass me Teddy – do you want him or Liliana tonight?’
Was that how it went? She is delving into the past, hauling it to the surface like an anchor chain encrusted with all its barnacles, all its strings of weed.
What else was there? Lies, half-lies, or just omissions that festered in the cracks between fact and supposition? Had she assumed things that no one had corrected? Was she the only one who hadn’t known?
Her febrile mind is at work. She is scouring every fissure in search of proof.
There were the words they had used, for instance, spontaneously and frequently; words they’d used to designate and define.
‘I want you to grow up like your father,’ he’d tell her, if ever she came home in tears from some schoolyard slight. ‘Cut the snivelling. Never let them think you are weak.’
‘Just tell them that your mother is unwell,’ she’d say to Ana, the gardening club waiting on the phone.
Even amid the tensions: ‘You can’t snap out of it, can you? Not even for your own daughter’s sake.’
Mother, father, daughter. The names that were also relationships had meshed them into a family, and never once had it occurred to her that their use might have been usurped.
She knew she didn’t resemble them, not really. She didn’t have her father’s height or her mother’s figure; she didn’t have their hair or eyes. But her skin was not so different from Bettina’s, she’d said to herself on the rare occasions she’d considered it, and Victor’s cheekbones were not unlike her own.
Silvery and bloody in the water, the rotting fish head glistens and revolves in the sun.
And if her parents really weren’t her parents? They must have had good reasons for their silence. Otherwise, how could this make sense?
Stigma. It must have been to shield her from the stigma. In the playground. From her schoolfriends’ parents. From the ranks of the nuns with their punitive eye for anyone who failed to conform.
That must have been it. They loved her; they love her still; they hadn’t told her only because they cared.
And yet, the doubts keep tugging at her, gently at first and then insistently, sucking at her skin with fishy mouths.
Why wouldn’t they have told her later, at fifteen, or eighteen, or twenty-one?
Did they really believe the truth would drive her away?
She feels a surge of love for them. She must reassure them: she would never forsake them simply because of her birth.
Perhaps, after all, they’d had no information. Or – perhaps they had had information they’d wanted to protect her from.
Ghoulish, the fish head propels itself around the pier. Frenzied and flashing in the sunlight, the multitude keeps feeding, the surface bubbling with gaping lips and seething with the thrust of their tails.
And if she were one of them, a child of the disappeared?
It is beyond imagining. It runs counter to all her values and everything she’s been brought up to believe.
She’d have that taint, of course. A secret defect. A deformity in her genes.
A picture suddenly comes to her, of a stain creeping across her neck like algae in bloom across a pond.
She shudders. No, she thinks. She doesn’t want any other story. If there is some other truth about her birth, well, so be it. She doesn’t need to know.
Anastasia is sitting on the terrace reading when Ana pads around the corner, a spidery bouquet in her hands.
‘They’re for you and Vasilis. For being so generous. For letting me stay,’ she says. Then, diffidently: ‘I stole them from the garden, and some from the edge of the road.’<
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Wild flowers veer in every direction, mixed with daisies and herb-sprigs and jasmine, and plumes of grasses at jaunty angles, in amongst the aniseed and the weeds.
‘They’re beautiful,’ says Anastasia, smiling at what she can see of Ana through the petals and the spikiness and the twigs. ‘Hold on to them for a moment, would you? I’ve got exactly the right vase.’
She takes one of Vasilis’s amphorae from the living room and fills it at the outdoor tap. Then she places it beside the turquoise bowl that is sitting on the outside table, and together they tame the unruliness into an almost-symmetrical shape.
For panache they add a red hibiscus. Then Ana vanishes around the side of the house and returns with stalks of rosemary and a handful of flowers she has no name for, heavy with purple petals.
‘It still looks a bit dishevelled,’ she says, poking in the last stems where she can.
Anastasia laughs. ‘They are wild flowers,’ she says.
Sugar-drunk, freighted with bright saddlebags, a bee procrastinates over the vase. It circles, and they stand still for a moment to see where it will land. They breathe in sun-dried aniseed and jasmine that is cut with the tang of seaweed, the scent so light they barely notice it because it is every day all around them, in layers on the flinty air.
It’s a good day, thinks Anastasia, glimpsing something of the Ana she used to know. She has talked with Vasilis and they’ve agreed to let her stay till the end of summer if she needs to, to allow her to make a decision about what to do.
Now she wonders whether inside Ana something is shifting, whether she is resolving something or accepting something – or whether this lightness is only momentary and she is about to slide back.
9
The Aegean
July 1999
‘Ana,’ he says. ‘To inspire you to take up pottery. Come and see.’
Ana looks up from where she is scraping carrots in the kitchen. She places the knife beside the chopping board and dries her hands on a cloth.
They go crunching over the pebbles, Vasilis leading, Ana a few paces behind. She follows him past the olive tree with the split in it, past the deckchairs and the coffee table set up between the pine trees, past the bar he has fashioned from driftwood and coils of thick sea-rope. Where garden meets shore, they pass the table set up for a seafarers’ banquet, the plates and bowls and goblets all ghostly with salt.
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