I had run into Kiplinger at a divey Irish bar in Chelsea shortly before I’d left for Greece. I’d stopped in for a drink after appraising an armoire up the street. Kiplinger was with an extremely attractive and very young woman, and both of them were drunk.
“Still selling furniture, Rupert?” he asked.
Kiplinger was now making movies. He’d lost the black turtleneck and was in an absurd salmon-colored jacket and no tie, which exposed the protruding shelf of his collarbone. He was drinking some narcotic Argentenian liquid that was all the rage on the West Coast. He treated me to some of it, and the effect was a floating numbness quickly followed by the sensation that someone was stabbing my eye with an icicle.
“What are you doing here?” I asked, gesturing at the bar, which really catered to old men.
“This is the only place where I can get this,” he said, raising the pleasing poison. At the time I hadn’t questioned why that particular bar would serve this stuff, but now it struck me as absurd.
I was still thinking about Kiplinger, wondering what on earth his films were like, when the woman in khaki pants appeared beside me at the bar. She smiled at me and I smiled back.
“Hard to figure out what to do when you’ve forgotten your book,” I said.
“Reading on a boat makes me feel queasy,” she replied.
“I’d like to get your drink,” I said. “What are you having?”
“Water,” she said wryly. She revealed to me a fistful of pills, impressive and varied.
“I suppose you don’t need a drink, not when you’ve got all that.”
She was about ten years older than I was, attractive and seemingly intelligent, with a sharp nose and lively eyes, like a dark-haired Janet Leigh. She looked at me with frank suspicion. “Yes, I suppose I’ve got everything covered.”
“Where are you going?” I asked. I was good at this, wearing women down.
“Aspros,” she said.
“There’s a coincidence. I’m going there too.”
“Is it really a coincidence?” she said. She smiled disarmingly. “After all, that’s where the boat is taking us.”
“Isn’t it also going to Mílos?”
“Yes,” she conceded. “But what is there in Mílos? The Venus is at the Louvre.”
I was going to ask her what there was in Aspros, but the bartender was waiting. “Glass of water for the lady,” I said.
She took the glass but hung onto her pills. I don’t suppose she wanted to drink them down in front of me. “Thank you,” she said.
“I hope I run into you in Aspros, “I said.
“It will be impossible not to.” Another smile and she walked off.
Contrary to what she’d said, there were a couple of things worth seeing in Mílos; I’d thought about stopping there. Mílos had a few archaeological sites of some value and an interesting set of catacombs. I threw back my brandy and waved at the bartender, who saw me but was having some sort of baffling encounter with a group of French tourists. I considered the wisdom of drinking at my usual pace. Maybe this was a good time to cut back. I did have a job to do, but there was so much luck involved in finding artifacts that it was hard to convince myself that being sober was worth much. After all, even the Venus de Milo had not been excavated but rather unearthed in the process of plowing a field. The date for that was 1820, and the reason the statue had ended up in the Louvre was that it was first claimed by a French naval officer who witnessed its discovery. I wondered what the French naval officer was doing in the field, and then what he was doing on Mílos.
The bartender, having finally liberated himself, was pouring brandy into my glass. “Do you know why the French were on Mílos in 1820?” I asked him.
The bartender shrugged his shoulders and looked down the bar. “Why do they go there now?”
I finished my drink and headed to the bathroom. I was just washing my hands when I heard a static bellowing over the PA system. This was accompanied by the sounding of the horn and some odd grinding of gears. I realized we were coming into the harbor. On the ferry, numerous people were gathering their things, pushing their way to the luggage rack. I checked my watch. We’d been on the ferry for just over four hours.
There was a fierce struggle for the luggage and I was very worried that I wouldn’t make it off the boat. As I was trying to get Nikos’s suitcase, a man reached over my head, and for a few tense moments I found myself surrounded by his armpit. When that was over, I pushed my way back onto the deck. I wondered what Nikos had in his suitcase. It felt like it was full of rocks. After all this rushing, pushing, and cursing, I was surprised to see that we were still some distance from shore. I found my skipper, who was regarding the distant twinkle of lights with a deep melancholy.
“Why are we stopping here, when the port is way over there?”
“The harbor is too shallow for this boat,” he replied.
I wasted a minute waiting for him to explain further. “How do I get ashore?”
He nodded at me, looked down at the two suitcases, picked mine up, and walked quickly to the other side of the ship. Then, cavalierly and in his customary silence, he tossed my suitcase over the side. I knew better than to shout at him. I had understood nothing for so long that constant bewilderment was beginning to feel almost normal. I rushed to look over the side, and, sure enough, there was a smaller boat, filling up with luggage and passengers. A young man was stowing my luggage beside the other cases.
There was a rope ladder dangling down the side of the ferry. An old woman had reached the bottom of the ladder and was trying to figure out how to make the final transition from the ferry to the smaller boat, which rocked quite violently in the chop. There were a few suggestions here and there, and finally two sturdy men stood up and with their hands raised and readied, like soccer goalies, waited for her to abandon the final rung of the ladder. This she did, they caught her, and a small cheer rose up. Then someone said something, and all eyes turned to me. At this point I was quite happy to stay on the ferry. The two sturdy men had stood up again and were readied. The rope ladder didn’t fill me with confidence and the woman, although old, was small and light. I considered jumping, but instead dropped Nikos’s suitcase—it was too heavy to carry down the ladder—and descended quickly, trying not to think. My sandals were slippery, and a couple of times my feet shot out from beneath me. It was with some relief that I reached the boat. I made my way to the rear after stepping on a lot of feet and a little boy stood up to give me his seat. After some rapid-fire suggestions on the part of his mother, who was holding a birdcage in her lap, he sat cautiously on my knee.
The boat ride was short, too short, and I was not yet ready to abandon our noncommittal floating, neither here nor there, when we reached the pier. I clambered out, struggling with Nikos’s suitcase and my own, and contemplated the open harbor, the gentle rise of buildings, and the approach of night. There was no one to meet me and even if someone had been there, I wouldn’t have recognized him. I was sufficiently obvious in my solitude, my vacant gazing, to let someone know that I was indeed the stranger they were supposed to meet up with, but soon the crowd thinned and I gave up. Maybe Nikos was supposed to contact someone when we arrived. I was hungry, ready for a drink, ready for a shower. Nikos had told me that I would be the guest of his cousin Neftali at her vacation home, which was on the path from Stavri to somewhere else, but of course I’d forgotten the name of the second town and wasn’t all that sure of the first. Neftali spent the summer going back and forth from Aspros to Mýkonos, where her husband came from, but she was mostly on Aspros and managed the house. And there was a cleaning lady, a cook who showed up for lunch, and a girl from the village to do the laundry. The caretaker lived two houses away and was married to the cleaning lady, or something like that, but Nikos had told me all this over drinks on the evening I’d come back from Delphi, and although I’d put on a good show, I’d been overwhelmed by my “abstract furies,” and then by the combination of whiskey and wine. I on
ly remembered a few things. Neftali was American-educated—her father, Kostas’s brother, had moved to New York when Neftali was eighteen—so she had many American friends, some of whom were staying at the house. One was in publishing, traveling with another man. And there was an artist with his wife. The artist was someone Nikos thought I would recognize, but he could only remember his first name, Jack. He was married to an Amanda, and the two fought a lot. I tried to come up with some contemporary artists, but I didn’t deal with anything contemporary and had never seen a piece more recent than a Miró pencil drawing from the late thirties come through the gallery doors.
I decided to eat at the second of the two restaurants by the harbor. By the time I’d settled in, lit my cigarette, and arranged my suitcases, it was almost ten. I decided to get a hotel and deal with finding the house and Neftali in the morning. A woman came out to take my order and I asked for some red wine and the stuffed eggplant.
“Do you know where I could get a room?” I asked.
“Room,” she repeated.
“Hotel,” I tried.
“Hotel!” she said. “Né, né. Aspete moment.”
This sounded promising. I didn’t really care where I stayed. The food came out quickly and, since I was starving, I applied myself to it. I wondered about my lady of the khaki pants. Where had she gone? Wasn’t this a small island? There were only two restaurants and the other was right beside this one, marked off only by a different choice of tablecloth. She wasn’t there either. What did it matter? She hadn’t responded favorably to my offer of a drink, and that’s probably why I was still thinking of her.
When I was done with my dinner, the woman came to clear my plates, accompanied by a teenage boy. He picked up the suitcases and said, “Zimmer.”
I insisted on carrying Nikos’s suitcase, because it helped justify my anger at having been abandoned. I knew it was petty. Of course he should have been running after Helen. Why should it bother me to be alone on this strange island dragging Nikos’s eighty-pound suitcase down a twisting alleyway of whitewashed buildings where, no doubt, this innocent-looking youth with the big cross dangling around his neck would assault me with a knife and take all my money? I transferred the suitcase to my left hand, but when the boy began heading up a set of narrow stairs, I had to hoist it in my arms and embrace it.
After ascending for maybe twenty steps, some wide, some steep, the young man put down my suitcase and said, “Camera.” He unlocked the front door and gestured for me to enter.
I followed him down a narrow corridor to my room. I could hear someone snoring in the dark, presumably in another room, and this punctuated the silence. The boy set my suitcase inside the door, opened the shutters, and disappeared, closing the door behind him. I put Nikos’s suitcase down and went to look out the window. There was a little cascade of lights down to the harbor and then the infinite darkness of the night ocean. I could hear waves knocking some wooden boats together on the pier and somewhere, far away but carried by the breeze, drunk and without accompaniment, a man was singing a traditional Greek song. I kicked off my shoes and took off my clothes. The bed was hard, like a small sack of flour, and I was wondering how one was supposed to sleep on such a thing when, exhausted, I passed out.
The next thing I knew, someone was knocking on the door and a young man’s voice called me to breakfast. I dressed quickly without bathing. I could already feel the heat slowly building and thought about going for a swim before I continued my search for Neftali and the others. Maybe Nikos had arrived. There was some thick coffee, fresh bread, butter, jam, a boiled egg, and a piece of yellow cheese. I was drinking my coffee when the young man came out of the kitchen with a fatty brown sausage. He had one for me and one for the couple who sat at the other table, dressed for hiking. They wore stout ugly shoes and knee socks. The man was done eating, he seemed like someone who ate in a quick, militaristic fashion, and was reading aloud from a bright blue Fodor’s guide.
“This is where the infant Perseus came to land in a chest, with his mother Danaë, who later married the island’s king, Polydectus; and it is here that, when he came to manhood, he petrified the ruthless king with the head of the gorgon Medusa.” He set down the book and nodded, satisfied, at his wife. Then he looked over at me politely and said, “Good morning.”
“Hello,” I said, “Good morning to you both.”
“Are you traveling alone?” the man inquired. He was English.
“I have some people I’m meeting, whom I hope to find soon.” I smiled and began to spread jam on my bread. “Funny. I was listening to you read, about Danaë and Perseus, and I thought that island was Sérifos.”
“It is,” the man said.
“Are you going to Sérifos?” I asked.
The man and his wife exchanged a quick look. “This is Sérifos,” the man replied.
I put a piece of bread in my mouth and chewed.
“Where did you think you were?” he asked.
“I was under the impression that I was on Aspros, and am now wondering why I thought that.” I smiled abruptly. A part of me blamed this man for my landing on the wrong island, and I was having a hard time remaining pleasant.
“Do you need to be on Aspros?” asked the man.
I nodded.
“There’s the Diana today, that goes to Mílos, and I think a boat from there goes to Aspros sometime this afternoon.”
“He’s very good with schedules,” his wife explained. “We were just on Mílos.”
“Would you know what time the Diana is arriving today?” I asked.
“I’d say in about fifteen minutes, maybe twenty.”
I noticed he was looking over my shoulder out the window and turned quickly. Sure enough, there was a ferry steaming into the harbor.
By the time I reached Mílos it was 2 P.M. and I had fifteen minutes to make my connection. It occurred to me that I might be making good time, but then I remembered that I was a day late. The ferry from Mílos to Aspros was only a couple of hours but I’d been in motion for almost a day, managing to circle my destination without actually getting there, and my patience was nearly gone.
I thought of Xerxes flogging the Hellespont. He was on his way from Persia to conquer Greece when he discovered that his bridges, necessary for getting his troops from Asia to Europe, had collapsed. Xerxes’ first move was to decapitate his engineers. His second was to submit the channel to a brutal lashing. The third was to toss in a set of shackles specifically cast for this purpose. When I’d read this in Herodotus as an undergraduate, it had been explained to me that this image of the deranged Persian emperor in the throes of hubris was what made the Greeks embrace reason. This same fear of chaos had led an artist to reduce a figure to its basic geometric elements. This made sense in the context of the classroom. But from where I stood, deck, Aegean, at sea again, I was beginning to feel the need to embrace the chaos. Flogging the water seemed reasonable. I thought about the archaic sculptor who had responded to the same anxiety, a generalized anxiety of spirit, by representing a horse as a series of triangles.
7
p
Aspros was a beautiful place. I could tell that at a distance, from the otherworldly sparkle coming off the mountains, the hush that fell over the people on deck as we drew closer. Fish sped through the water at the side of the ship like spits of silver, and I thought I could smell jasmine—clouds of it—coming off the land. I was drugged for a moment, dizzy with anticipation, but there was a bitter taste at the back of my throat. I felt someone watching me and turned quickly, but no one was there, only a mother fixing the collar of her son’s shirt, a little boy who looked straight into my eyes and then down at the tops of his shoes. I kept looking at him, until I felt that my looking—his mother was furtively watching me—was unwelcome. The engines groaned like a beast awakening, and then, with a great cough of oily smoke, they were quiet. I lined up with the other passengers, carrying the two suitcases. I made the descent by rope ladder into the smaller boat and for
one moment had the desire to let go, to fall into the water and drown.
As we were transported to shore by the smaller boat, I saw a familiar figure—Nikos—his arms folded in front of him, his face dark with concern. I wondered what was bothering him because I knew he was looking for me and was immediately cheered. I saw him pick my face out of the group as we approached, and there was a momentary flash of joy, but this was followed with something less indulgent.
“Rupert!” he shouted at me from the pier. “Rupert, what have you been doing?”
I ignored the question. I was struggling with his suitcase, struggling with mine. He helped me get the cases out of the boat.
“Aspros is lovely,” I said.
“I am sick with worry,” he said.
“How are Helen and Sue? I hope you gave them my best.”
Nikos regarded me and smiled. “They are in the best of health.”
“Your suitcase,” I said. “I can carry mine.” I began walking down the pier.
“Where were you, Rupert?”
“Sérifos.”
“Why did you get off there?”
“I thought it was Aspros. I wasn’t really paying attention.”
“I didn’t know what had happened to you. I thought maybe you got off again in Piraeus and were waiting for me for the next boat, but Olivia says she thought she saw you on the ferry.” He switched his suitcase to his left hand. “But then you disappeared.”
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