“Ask him if this is all he found,” I said.
Nikos turned to the man and they talked back and forth. The man was gesturing a lot and making faces, and I translated this to mean I found this lamp. Why, don’t you like it? It’s all I have. But then his face broke into a wide smile. Nikos said something else, and the man went back into his house.
“He has some pieces. He didn’t think we’d want them because they’re broken.”
The man had a small basket with pottery fragments, one maybe three inches square that had a gorgeous octopus painted on it. I wondered what the best way to display a fragment like this was. I looked through the pieces, which came from at least three different pots.
“Does he have any more?”
Nikos and the man spoke for a while, and then Nikos got up. “He wants us to follow him.”
We walked around the house to a little field. The zucchini plants were in full blossom and the tomato plants had started to bear fruit, although it was still green. And then I saw between the furrows, just sitting in the dirt, smaller pieces of pottery, as if the dry dirt had spat them out along with the vegetables. It seemed suspicious that he had a field full of pottery just for me. There was a fairy-tale quality to it that I didn’t trust.
“Ask him why he’s moved his shed,” I said.
Nikos and the man talked for a while, and the man kept shaking his head.
“There was an earthquake and half the mountain slid down. This was two years ago. He was able to rebuild his house, mostly using the original materials that he found and carried back up the hill with donkeys. But the shed …”
“Amazing,” I said.
Nikos looked at the scattered sheep manure, the farmer and his dirty shirt, the dust on his shoes. “Amazing?”
“Don’t you see?” I said. “It’s like Delphi. Who knows who once lived here, what’s been hidden for all these years? The earthquake makes everything possible.”
“You think there’s more?”
“I want to dig up his field,” I said.
Nikos considered the field with more respect. He spoke to the man and there was some back and forth of disbelief. Then the man said something quite nasty and angry, to which Nikos responded with a placid and sympathetic expression.
“I take it he doesn’t want us digging up his backyard,” I said.
“No, no. He just wants to harvest the zucchini first.”
“How long will that take?”
“Another two weeks.”
“Why don’t we just pay for the vegetables?”
“I tried. He’s charging too much.”
“Nikos …”
“I’m not going to pay it.”
“You’re being absurd. It’s Uncle William’s money.”
“And I am the one responsible to negotiate for it. This man is charging too much, and I am not going to let you throw your money away.”
There was no point in arguing with Nikos over this, even if the money for the vegetables was probably half that of what Nikos paid to his tailor every month. This was an issue of pride, not just mine, but Nikos’s, Neftali’s, Kostas’s …the pride of every Nikolaides since the dawn of time. But I was annoyed. He could have negotiated further for the vegetables, but despite his resistance to being overcharged, Nikos also found it distasteful to haggle. As if feeling this anger from behind—I was staring at the back of his head—he pulled the Vespa over suddenly, cut the engine, and turned around.
“What is two weeks? Look where you are. Now you can go to the beach, eat some food, talk to people.”
“I am here to find art for my Uncle William.”
“You should be happy that you have some time when you don’t need to wake up before it gets too hot, where you’re not digging through the ancient droppings of the sheeps.”
I was quiet.
“I will buy you a drink,” said Nikos, and he started the motor up again.
Nikos was right. Now that I had time to think after the initial excitement of discovery, it made sense to take the next couple of weeks to prepare. There were a few things I needed to figure out. I had no idea how old the fragments were. I’d have to find out about classical Aspros for that; all I knew is that it had been sacked by the Samians in 530 B.C. Most of this stuff was probably Hellenic or later, but I wasn’t sure what made me think this. If I had been dealing with a dresser rather than pottery fragments, I would have been sure. I would have slid the drawers open, checked the dovetailing, checked for original fixtures, looked at the feet and other decorative elements, and determined whether the structural wood was white pine or maple. There was a real science to furniture, and that was because it was recent history. But the field was a mystery, a bunch of broken pots to be pieced together by consulting the jumble of broken memories that we referred to—with a willful and blind faith—as history.
Nikos and I stopped at a café in the center of Stavri. He ordered a plate of sticky cakes and a cup of coffee and I had a bottle of beer.
“Why are you so concerned what the exact of everything is? Do you think your Uncle William cares?”
I considered this. “No, I’m sure he doesn’t. I’ll type up some letters for him, give him a nice provenance for the stuff.” I poured my beer into a glass. “You’re right.”
“But there is still something bothering you?”
I laughed. “Yes,” I said. “I want to know how old the things are.”
“Don’t be that way, Rupert,” he said. “There’s no reason to worry. I know you like to do a job well, like me.”
“That’s the prerogative of those who work only on occasion.”
Nikos smiled. “But that farmer with his sheep, he cares about the zucchinis and the tomatoes. He probably asks the same amount of money for vegetables as for pottery. So dig it. Buy it. And then you can do all the chemical things back in the States, find out how old it really is there. Now you just get your shovel and your bucket for sand and enjoy.”
“How old do you think the pieces are, Nikos?”
“I don’t know these things,” he said. But for someone so disinterested, he was pondering something. Later, as we sat in the shade enjoying our cakes, I saw Olivia walking through town alone. She had a canvas shopping bag on her shoulder. She stopped at the grocers and looked at some pears, then went in to buy them.
“There’s Olivia,” said Nikos. “I’ll get her.”
“No,” I said. “She’s busy.”
“Busy?” Nikos looked at me suspiciously. “Now you don’t like Olivia?”
“She’s ill,” I said. “She has cancer.”
Nikos was quiet for a moment. Of course he’d known. Neftali must have told him. But she probably made him promise not to tell me. Nikos was looking directly at me and I was doing my best to remove all expression from my face.
“All right,” I said. “I’ll get her.”
Olivia was paying for the pears and a couple of tins of Italian sardines. We’d been eating the sardines on the terrace in the afternoon, and it seemed that, at the villa, if you did things more than once it became a routine that you could not vary. I knew Olivia had been memorizing key phrases from a language guide, but to hear her using it affected me. The woman gave Olivia her change, and Oliva said to her, “Evkaristó,” in a determined and nervous way.
“You’re showing us all up,” I said.
Olivia was startled, surprised to see me there. “Hello, Rupert,” she said. “Just in time to carry my bag.”
I took the bag. “Nikos and I are at the café across the way.”
“Yes, I know,” said Olivia. “I saw you sitting together.”
“But you didn’t say hello?”
“No,” said Olivia. She smiled a gorgeous, knowing smile.
“Why not?” I asked.
“Because you are avoiding me.”
I suddenly felt both guilty and stupid. “Well, I’m not avoiding you now, and I have been very busy.”
“Busy,” she repeated. She looked over
to Nikos, and he waved. “I could use a coffee,” she said.
By the end of the week, Olivia and I had reached an uneasy truce. We were often in the same room, but all hope and banter was gone. It was Friday. I only knew this because Neftali had decided to take the ferry for Mýkonos in the morning, and that ferry left on Fridays. Now that Jack was gone, she didn’t mind leaving. Apparently, none of the rest of us struck her as pyromaniacs. She left Nathan in charge, and we were all comfortable with that. Amanda was still lurking around the house and Nikos was still sleeping with her. I wondered when she was going to follow Jack to Hydra.
Old Amandirt was much easier to handle without Jack around. She didn’t call me Rupie and sometimes read books, quietly, in the garden. She was still unkempt, which made Nathan suspicious of her, but she was much less contrived without Jack and even made jokes that were funny. Nikos, who I’d thought was on the brink of escaping back to Athens, now spent nearly all his time with her, which of course increased the time I spent with her. She and Olivia had done some things together, some short walking tours, and on this afternoon when the rest of us had napped—drinking four beers in the early afternoon had made napping a necessity for me that day—Olivia had taken a notebook and Amanda her watercolors and the two women had found a field suitable to their pursuits. Olivia had long wanted to try her hand at poetry, something that had been overshadowed by her marriage to the Scottish book dealer, who, although he gave her no children, had led a time-consuming and mostly entertaining social life. She had a blank notebook and her copy of Moby-Dick, and she spent her time filling the one and wasting the other.
We ate at the house that night because of Neftali’s imminent departure. I didn’t say much at dinner. I was wondering what I was going to do with Olivia. I think I’d been lazily pursuing her because she was attractive and kept moving away, and these two things had kept me in motion. But the notion of pursuing someone who was terminally ill was tasteless, and even though I could be tasteless—the girl in Delphi, the salesgirl at Saks—Olivia did not bring out that aspect of my character. We had had no physical involvement, which made things much easier. It was just casual flirtation, and as she was thirteen years older than me, how serious could I have been? But I could not get Olivia out of my mind. Her illness, rather than making her more alien, seemed to bond me to her. Her illness made me feel we had something in common, but what this was I did not know. I was not ill, not physically, but I did not care what I did with the rest of my life, and she did not have a rest-of-her-life to concern her, and maybe that made us compatible. Olivia caught me staring at her and held my gaze with frank concern. I smiled, but it was a bland smile, incapable of putting anyone at ease.
After dinner, Neftali insisted that Amanda show us her pictures. She had one rather large painting of meadow and it seemed to have been going well—nice impressionistic dappling, roughly sketched-in wall—until she’d overdone a pink flower in the foreground. The flower was flat and too large. Amanda seemed to have sabotaged her own painting. To look at it, one would have guessed the flower was the donation of some second-grader who felt the picture would be too dull without it.
“What do you think, Rupert?” asked Clive, after everyone was done with their compliments, including a “very nice” from Nathan.
“I’m better at guessing how old things are, so with this I’d say sometime between two and four this afternoon.”
“Very funny,” said Amanda.
“Go on, Rupert. Tell us what you think,” said Olivia.
I realized that Olivia was mad at me, justifiably, since I hadn’t responded in a very mature way to the news of her illness. By asking my opinion of the painting, she was inviting me to show the others what a little shit I was, and it was tempting to rise to the occasion, to make up something like The banal beauty of the landscape is questioned by the intentionally naïve flower in the foreground, but I wasn’t feeling quite so ungenerous.
“It’s clear this picture was done en plein air,” I said, and smiled. “There’s something genuine in the treatment of the light.”
Amanda nodded, rather pleased with this. I looked over at Olivia and raised my eyebrows smugly.
“What about you, Olivia?” said Nathan. “What do you have to show for your time?”
Olivia laughed loudly. “I have a truly ghastly poem.”
“You must read it,” said Clive.
“God, no,” she said. “In addition to being clumsy, it’s also depressing.”
“What?” said Neftali. “I’m sure it is a very nice poem.”
“No, it’s not,” said Olivia. “It’s like an ugly person walking along in cement shoes.”
“Now you have to read it,” said Nathan.
“It’s like, it’s like …”
“What?” said Nathan.
“It’s like someone who always wanted to write poems for years,” she continued with some emotion, “but always had the clarity of judgment not to do it, or at least to keep it to herself, and now finds that—”
“And now,” said Clive, interrupting, “finds herself surrounded by a table full of people who all love her and, even if they don’t, have had a bottle of wine apiece and wouldn’t know what made a poem good or bad even when sober.”
Nathan had grown introspective. I looked over at Nikos, and he said, “If you read that poem, I will sing, and I am a very bad singer.”
Olivia had realized that she didn’t have a choice, not without being labeled someone who took her poetry seriously, so she nodded at Nikos and said, “Who could resist that?”
“What’s it called?” asked Amanda.
Olivia picked up her notebook and opened it. “It is called,” she said smiling, “‘A Cock to Asclepius.’”
“I already like it!” said Clive, and everyone laughed.
Olivia did read her poem and afterward I made her give it to me, and I have kept it folded in my wallet ever since, taken out rarely, because I’m scared that one day the words will be gone and I won’t have it anymore, that little document that changed how I thought about my dear Olivia and the future.
Apparently, the final words of Socrates had been, “Crito, I owe a cock to Asclepius; will you remember to pay the debt?” And this is the poem:
We don’t die well. Even the best of us
reduced to ugly children on our way
to dust, hoping that this lengthy absence
will function as a sort of presence, others
paying our debts, moving the furniture, placing
new place settings at the table. New!
Since new it is. Not death—silence, really,
our little implosion sucking those around
them into movement, much—as when we lived—
our little suns kept our friends revolving,
blood asurge and surging. Still yes, but still
space on the bed is charged as Malevitch’s
white field, the quiet of the breakfast table—
your thoughts, replacing mine, now doubled, your
extra sweater. Congealing casserole—
my new blood, that bleating phone—new heart, your
step and step, my new feet, endless walking,
pushing always the space in front—my space.
Olivia read it in a halting way but still somehow too quickly, and after, when I was still trying to figure out what the space at the end referred to, she had already demanded that Nikos burst into song.
9
p
For the next two weeks the weather remained clear and hot, and I walked about with an image of the field in my mind: the dusty zucchinis and tomatoes, the thin-fleshed peppers with their narrow leaves—all those lucky plants with their roots plunged into the earth. Olivia said she recognized obsession, and this was obsession.
We were spending a lot of time together, and everyone—me included—was surprised at my seeming devotion. I was following her around, maybe even loving her. I knew I had given in to a pointless hope for o
ur future and, with that, pity—not for Olivia but for myself. I’m not sure how Olivia felt. She hadn’t hesitated when I’d followed her into her bedroom. There was an unshowy confidence in everything she did. Unlike other women I’d known, she didn’t seem to care what sort of relationship we were having. Olivia was different. She never made much of her feelings, and I admired her for it.
In Neftali’s absence, we all became brazenly immoral. I moved into Olivia’s room and Nikos moved in with Amanda, even though our room was quieter, because Amanda’s had a double bed. We agreed that when Neftali returned from Mýkonos in the next few days we would all go back to our old sleeping arrangements, so as not to create scandal. Neftali would no doubt recognize and appreciate the hypocrisy.
I wanted to get to work on the field, if for no other reason than to be occupied. Olivia’s concern for her own health was now exacerbated by her concern for me, watching her struggle. A morning when she didn’t get out of bed was a morning with me sipping coffee in the garden, worried, waiting for her to get up. If I’d been digging up the field, it would have been better for us both. A part of me was still angry with Nikos, who for all his good taste and love of beauty didn’t seem to recognize the value of classical art. He refused to be humbled by it—to be humbled by anything, for that matter—as if having a face that women loved and clothes that men admired were enough.
“You’re always like this, Rupert. Classical this, classical that. You have to stop. It’s like me asking you to be a cowboy.”
“It’s not the same thing at all,” I said. We were sitting in the garden together, and I was trying to convince Nikos to pay a visit to the farmer, who should have been ready to harvest everything.
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