9

I made my way through the mud streets, the same complicated solitude. I could almost see myself, glowing in borrowed light. A voice, my own but outside me, speaking something other than words, commented somehow on the action.I was made of denim and sheepskin. My shoes were waterproof, my gloves lined with wool.This is the way things happen. I walk into a café in a wind-beaten town and they are right there even if I don’t know it at the time. And now I duck under a stone beam on a cold smoky morning in the towered hamlet where no one (almost no one) lives and he is sitting on a blue crate, a crate for soda bottles, and there is one for me as well, upended. A fire is going, twigs mostly, and he lifts his feet off the dirt floor, putting them close to the flames, and it is nothing, a talk in a basement room with a medium-sized man who has a cold. But how else would it be? What did I expect? The only true surprise is that I am in the scene. It ought to be someone else sitting here, a man who has seen himself plain.”What do we have?” he said. “First we have a film director and now we have a writer. This is not so strange really.””Frank thinks I want to write about him.””About him or about us?””I’m a friend of Owen Brademas. That’s all. I know Owen. We’ve talked many times.””A man who knows languages. A calm man, very humane, I think. He has a wide and tolerant understanding, a capacity for civilized thought. He is not hurried, he is not grasping for satisfactions. This is what it means to know languages.”He had a long face, a receding hairline, pale freckles high on his forehead. Small hands. This reassured me in some mysterious way, the size of his hands. His face was impassive. He wore a black tunic unraveling at the right shoulder. I studied, I took mental notes.”I thought you would want to speak Greek,” I said. “Or whatever the language of a particular place.””We are no longer in a place. We are a little disorganized. Soon it will be all right again. Also this business with Frank Volterra is unique. What do we have? A situation we have not had before. So we are attempting to adjust.””Are the others interested? Will they agree to be part of a film?””There are problems. It is a question of our larger purpose. We must consider many things. One thing is whether we are such filmic material as Frank Volterra believes. Maybe we are not. He lacks a complete understanding.””Owen Brademas had this understanding.””Have you?” he said.”If we are talking about a solvable thing, a riddle or puzzle, then I have solved it, yes.””What is your solution?””The letters match,” I said. “Name, place-name.”He was leaning back, balanced, hands clasped on his knees, his feet still dangling over the flames. I crouched forward, wanting to feel the heat on my face. He didn’t change expression, although it’s possible to say that my remark, my reply, prompted him to renew his stoic mien, to inhabit it more fully. I’d made him aware of the look on his face.”Do we seem improbable to you?””No,” I said.”I wonder why this is.””I don’t know.””We ought to seem improbable. What do you think?””I’m not sure. I don’t know.””Something in our method finds a home in your unconscious mind. A recognition. This curious recognition is not subject to conscious scrutiny. Our program evokes something that you seem to understand and find familiar, something you cannot analyze. We are working at a preverbal level, although we use words, of course, we use them all the time. This is a mystery.”His eyes were dim, blood-flecked. He had a two-day stubble, reddish blond, darker than the hair on his head. His fingernails were yellowish and thick.”In one sense we barely exist,” he said. “It is a difficult life. There are many setbacks. The cells lose touch with each other. Differences arise of theory and of practice. For months nothing happens. We lose purpose, get sick. Some have died, some have wandered off. Who are we, what are we doing here? There is not even a threat of the police to give us a criminal identity. No one knows we exist. No one is looking for us.”He stopped briefly in order to cough.”But in another sense we have a permanent bond. How could it be otherwise? We have in common that first experience, among others, that experience of recognition, of knowing this program reaches something in us, of knowing we all wanted at once to be part of it. When I first heard of this, before I became a member, it was in Tabriz, eight years ago. People in a hotel talked of a cult murder somewhere in the area. Much later, I cannot tell you how, I learned what the elements were. Immediately it reached me, something about the nature of the final act. It seemed right to me. Extreme, insane, whatever you wish to call it in words. Numbers behave, words do not. I knew it was right. Inevitable and perfect and right.””But why?””The letters matched.””But to kill?””Nothing less,” he said. “It had to be that. I knew at once it was right. I cannot describe how fully and deeply it reached me. Not as an answer, not as a question. Something else totally. Some terrible and definitive thing. I knew it was right. It had to be. Shatter his skull, kill him, smash his brains.””Because the letters matched.””I believe you see it, how nothing else would suffice. It had to be this one thing, done with our hands, in direct contact. Nothing else, nothing less. You do see that it’s correct. You see the rightness of it. You know it intuitively. The whole program leads up to this. Only a death.”He put his feet on the ground in order to cough, head down, hands covering his face. When he was finished he leaned back again, balancing, his feet in the air once more. I reached to the side for more twigs, dropped them on the fire. We sat that way in silence for a while. Andahl leaning well back, his feet raised. Axton crouched forward, looking into the fire.”We walked through these mountains from north to south. When we came into the Mani we knew we would stay. We are set back but only for a time. What is here. This is the strength of the Mani. It does not suggest things to us. No gods, no history. The rest of the Peloponnese is full of associations. The Deep Mani, no. Only what is here. The rocks, the towers. A dead silence. A place where it is possible for men to stop making history. We are inventing a way out.”He lowered himself again, coughed into his armpit. He was wearing a strange pair of suede boots trimmed on the outside with some fleecy synthetic—women’s boots, I thought. His pants were loose and brown, drawn in at the ankles.”The large stone outside this village,” I said. “Why were those words painted there?””Someone, leaving, painted the words.””When you found them, you painted them over, made them illegible.””We are not painters. It was not a good painting.””Why did he do it?””There are many setbacks. We lose purpose, get sick. Some people die, some wander off. There are differences in meaning, differences in words. But know this. Madness has a structure. We might say madness is all structure. We might say structure is inherent in madness. There is not the one without the other.”He coughed into his armpit.”No one has to stay. There are no chains or gates. More die than leave. We are here to carry out the pattern. A small patient task. You have the word in English. Abecedarian. This is what we are.””I don’t know the word.””Learners of the alphabet. Beginners.””And how did you begin, how did the cult begin?””This can wait for another time. We will talk again if the occasion permits.”Through the rest of the conversation I found myself eliminating contractions from my speech. Not to ridicule or mimic Andahl. It was something of a surrender to the dominance these complete words seemed to possess, their stronger formulation, spoken aloud.”Does the cult have a name?””Yes.””Can you tell me what it is?””No, impossible. Nameforms are an important element in our program, as you know. What do we have? Names, letters, sounds, derivations, transliterations. We approach nameforms warily. Such secret power. When the name is itself secret, the power and influence are magnified. A secret name is a way of escaping the world. It is an opening into the self.”From somewhere under his tunic he took a maroon scarf and wrapped it around his head. I took this to mean we were coming to an end.”What we have not talked about is the experience of killing,” he said. “How it confirms the early sense of recognition, the perception that the program must end this way. It confirms everything. It tells us how deep we are in.” He was watching me through this. “We have not talked about the sound, the hammers, a damp noise, the way she crumpled, how soft it was. We have not talked about the way she crumpled or how we kept hitting, Emmerich sobbing, the word-building German, he could only groan and sob. Or how long it took, we have not talked about this. Or how we hit harder because we could not stand the sound, the damp sound of the hammers on her face and head. How Emmerich used the cleft end of the hammerhead. Anything to change the sound. He gouged, you know? We were hysterical. It was a frenzy but not of blood. A frenzy of knowing, of terrible confirmation. Yes, we are here, we are actually killing, we are doing it. It was beyond any horror but this was precisely what we had always seen and known. We had our proof. How right we were to tremble when we first learned the program. We have not talked about the way she crumpled or how we knelt over her, having found her weeks before, having determined her condition, having tracked her, having waited in the dust, in the silences, the burning sun, watching her drag her leg, watching her approach the place, the name, the place, all this, having matched the Greek letters, or how she crumpled, only stunned at first, a single blow, or how we knelt over her with the hammers, smashing, beating in her head, or how he gouged with the cleft end, pulling out brains, or the sight of it. We have not talked about the sight of it, how flesh gives up its bloom and vigor, how functions gradually cease, how we could seem to ourselves to be causing functions to end, one after the other, metabolism, response to stimuli, actually sensing these progressive endings in the way she sank. Or how little blood, not at all what we expected, the blood. We looked at each other, amazed at this paucity of blood. It made us feel we had missed a step along the way.”He went outside to cough. He was out there for some time, hawking and spitting. It made me think of the night I’d vomited pigeon swill in that alley in Jerusalem, an episode I now saw as a clear separation, a space between ways of existing. No wonder I’d puked. What haste my system made to reject the whole business, what an eager spew, burbling out like some chemical death. I’d leaned against the wall in a cold sweat, head bent, hearing Volterra laugh.”Has this been of help to you?” Andahl said, coming back in, teary-eyed from his exertions.”Of help?””This talk we have had. Has it given you a start? What do you think? Is there an interest, is there something here? If Frank Volterra gains a better understanding, if he learns what the method is, he may decide it is not a thing that adapts well to film. It is not a film. It is a book.””I see. You are helping me toward the writing of a book.””You are a writer.””If you lose one man, you have another in reserve.””There is no question of losing,” he said. “The only question is how we will decide in the end.””But why are you interested, either way, either form?””In one sense we barely exist. There are many setbacks. People die, they go out one day and disappear. Differences arise. For months nothing happens. The cells lose touch with each other. No one knows we are here. I talked to the others about a film. I myself argued for a film. Now I see there is more to discuss. We are still talking. There is bitter opposition. I must tell you that. We are talking about the value of an external object. Not a cult document but a thing outside the cult. An interface with the world. What is a book? What is the nature of a book? Why does it have the shape it has? How does the hand interact with the eyes when someone reads a book? A book throws a shadow, a film is a shadow. We are trying to define things.””You want an external object. I am trying to understand.””It will outlast us. This is the argument I make to them. Something to outlast us. Something to contain the pattern. We barely exist. No one will know it when we die away. What do you think, Axstone?”I studied him for further details, a mark on the back of the hand, a way of standing, although I had no reason to collect such incidentals beyond an uncertain wish to return a truth to the landscape itself, the name-haunted place.It was warmer now. I followed him out of the village, hurrying to keep up. A woman, the old one, appeared through an archway on the slope below us, motionless among goats browsing in the thistle-heads, a thousand feet above the sea.Frank’s car was parked behind mine. He had a black Mazda bearing on its windshield the checkered decal that showed it was rented. Andahl got in and they drove away.

By noon I was checked out, sitting in my car outside the hotel. A merchant ship lay at anchor. Del sat next to me, cleaning the lens of a still camera with a blow-brush. Pieces of equipment were on the floor, above the dashboard, in the open glove compartment. We were talking about Frank’s movies, the two features. A man’s hat came sailing across the street.”I missed the second one,” I said. “I saw the first when we were living on an island in Lake Champlain. You cross the lake on a little ferry, a canal barge, that runs by a cable strung from one bank to the other.””Don’t let him know.””What do you mean?””He’ll get upset,” she said.”That I missed one of his movies? He wouldn’t care. Why would he care?””He’ll get upset. He’s serious about things like that. He expects things from friends and he can’t understand, it’s beyond belief to him that a friend would not do anything, go anywhere, rob and steal, to see one of his films. He’d do it for them, he expects them to do it for him. He may be hard to get along with at times, especially when his brain is raging, like right now, he’s the incredible deadly manta ray, the killer of the deep, but you know he’d do anything for you, without exception. It’s all part of the same thing.””I watched TV, Kathryn went to the movies. That was our private metaphor.””Frank is loyal,” she said. “He’s serious about that. He’s got a side people don’t know. He more or less literally saved my life. He has that side. I wouldn’t call it protective exactly. It’s a little deeper. He wanted to show me I could be better than I was. It’s partly because he thought the way I was living was a form of self-indulgence, which is something he hates. But he also wanted to get me out of there. I was hanging around with people on the fringes. They were people with borrowed vans. Everybody had a borrowed van or knew where to get one. I was always crossing a bridge in someone’s borrowed van. I lived with a van painter for a while. We lived in his van. He painted mystical designs on vans and campers. He was after a total design environment, he used to say. Your house, your van, your garage. That was his vision. I was working in television then, a fringe job. TV is the coke medium. The pace is the same. Frank helped me with that. I always half-disgusted him. How I could think so little of myself that I would just go to waste.”She used lens tissue moistened with alcohol.”When are you going home?””When he’s ready,” she said.”Where do you live?””Oakland.””Where does Frank live?””He wouldn’t want me to say.””He was always like that. Funny. We never knew where he lived. At least I didn’t.””He took me to the hospital to see my father dying. I had to be dragged if you can picture how pathetic. Do the hard things. That’s a skill I don’t ever want to learn.”I saw Volterra’s car in the rearview mirror. He parked behind us, got out, opened the back door of my car, got in without looking at either one of us.”What did he want?””He wanted to talk about books,” I said.”He wouldn’t tell me why he wanted to see you.””It’s just an intuition, Frank, but I think he’s doing all this on his own. I don’t think they know about it. I think he may be a deserter. Or maybe they threw him out. I don’t think people who believe what they believe and do what they do would even remotely consider the idea of being put on film, put in a book.””We find out tomorrow,” he said.”Has he arranged a meeting?””I talk to them in the morning.””I don’t think they’ll be there.””They’ll be there. And they’ll listen to me. They’ll see at once what I want to do and why they ought to be part of it.””Maybe. But he was alone when you found him. He’s still alone. Anything outside the cult is meaningless to them. They’re locked in. They’ve invented their own meaning, their own perfection. The last thing they want is an account of their lives.””What’s your stake in all this?””I’m going home,” I told him. “I saw Andahl in his pixie boots. I can go home now. If you’re confused by my presence here, so am I. But I’m leaving and I’m not coming back.””What do you do in Athens? What’s your job?””You still think I’m here to write about you.””What’s your job?” he said.”I’m called a risk analyst.”Del said, “A likely story.” Sighting through the viewfinder.”It’s a mass of organized guesswork. Political risk insurance. Companies don’t want to be caught short.”I was talking with my head turned toward Del.”It sounds vague,” she said. “It sounds vague, Frank. What do you think?”He sat in the middle of the back seat. The play in her voice got him off course. The urgency he’d brought with him, the sense of imperative purpose, began slowly to dissolve, and with it his suspicion. He sat back, thinking. A day’s wait.”How will you do it?” she said.She’d joined him at precisely the right moment in his meditations. He answered immediately.”Two people from Rome. That’s all I need. Kids I know. They bring the equipment on the car ferry from Brindisi. Drive down here from Patras. We go to work. I don’t necessarily want to shoot twenty-two hours of film, then work it back on the editing table. We shoot whatever’s here. I don’t care if I end up with half an hour. Whatever the yield. It won’t matter anyway. The coterie toads are all lined up. They’re ready to turn. My time has come. I’ve sensed it the last eighteen months. People give off a musty smell. Whole projects reek. You can’t believe how much pleasure it’ll give them. A few seconds of pure pleasure. A platonic orgasm. Then they’ll forget it completely. Once you fail, you’re okay again. And this is the time. It’s possible to sense these things. I sense these things across fucking oceans.””You’ll give them something to bury you for,” I said.”I’ll go beyond the bounds. They can bury me or not. Some people will see it right away. They’ll know exactly what I’m doing, frame by frame. The rest don’t matter.”Maybe it would happen the way he believed it would. He’d meet them in a ruined tower near the sea. Strange faces in a ring. There is time and there is film time. It was a natural extension, the barest of transferals, to make the crossing, to leap into the frame. Film was implied in everything they did.But there was Andahl. He’d introduced an element of motivation, of attitudes and needs. The cult’s power, its psychic grip, was based on an absence of such things. No sense, no content, no historic bond, no ritual significance. Owen and I had spent several hours building theories, surrounding the bare act with desperate speculations, mainly to comfort ourselves. We knew in the end we’d be left with nothing. Nothing signified, nothing meant.Andahl etched an almost human face on this hard blank surface. How could he still be one of them? He wanted something. He’d attempted to draw me in, slipping bits of information to me, withholding others temporarily. He was maneuvering toward some further contact.He’d told me those words on the rock were put there by someone leaving. The apostate manages his own escape by revealing a secret of the organization, breaking its hold on him. He was the one who’d painted the words—the words that may have been more than a reference to what they did, that may have been their name. Someone else blotted them out. It was possible they were looking for him.All he wanted from us was a chance to explain. These meetings were a way of turning himself toward the air of worldly reason, of conventional sense and its manipulations. He was raising a call for human pity and forgiveness.”I’ve been getting to know this mountain,” Frank said. “The other day I was going on foot up a narrow trail above one of the villages. There was a house up there, looked uninhabited. I peer into every structure that looks uninhabited. In my uniquely dumbfuck way I figure sooner or later I’ll come across them. This was before Andahl had set up the meeting. I was scouring the hills, scouring the valleys. Now I’m on this trail when suddenly I hear behind me the sound of goat-bells. Here they come, without exaggeration, eighty-five goats, scrambling up the trail behind me, coming fast, for goats. On either side of the trail we find orchards of prickly pear. Whole fields of the stuff. I pick up the pace. I’m not running yet. I don’t want to embarrass myself by running. The idea is to make it over the rise where the terrain opens up and there is plenty of room for the goats to graze without trampling me. But what happens? Fifty yards from the end of the trail I hear a pounding driving hellbent noise. Donkeys and mules, a whole train of them, galloping down the trail at me. A guy is sitting on the lead mule. He’s the muleteer, a reckless-looking bastard, a real Maniot, sitting side-saddle, reaching back to swat his mule on the rump with a long switch. And he’s uttering what I took to be the muleteer’s traditional cry, it sounds like the cry of a Venetian boatman poling around a sharp bend. A barbaric vowel sound. A thousand-year-old cry. I had the definite impression it was meant to urge the mules on. The goats meanwhile are jumping up my ass. They’re in a frenzy of hoofs and curved horns, piling up on top of each other. Like some massive rut, the peak of the rutting cycle. And the donkeys and mules are bearing down. It’s their only run of the week. All week they’ve plodded under heavy loads. Now they finally have a chance to run, to get loose, feel free, the wind in their manes, if they had manes, and there I was, in their path, the goats piling up behind me.” He paused thoughtfully. “I didn’t know whether to shit or go blind.”He would never finish the story. Del started laughing and couldn’t stop. I hadn’t imagined she could laugh at all but his last remark sent a light to her face, almost broke it apart in a kind of whimpering mirth. Soon Frank was laughing too. They seemed to take their good feeling beyond the story he’d been telling. She sat facing the windshield, making that helpless sound. Their laughter had points of contact, found each other like instruments in a brass quintet, communicating subtle and lovely things. Frank reached over the seat and put his hands on her breasts, awkwardly, clutching tight. His delight had to find something to grasp, to adhere to, some part of her. He narrowed his eyes, showed clenched teeth. It was his old hungry look, hungry for the limit of things. Eventually he settled back in his seat, hands clasped behind his neck. I needed Kathryn to help me see him complete, feel what we’d all felt together, years ago.The water beyond the jetty was blowing white. They got out of the car, camera equipment slung over Del’s shoulders. Frank nodded to me. They said goodbye, standing on the sidewalk, and I drove north, out of town, seeing at once the summit of Taygetus, well ahead, as I’d seen it with Tap from the other side when I first came down to the Mani, a wide reach above the hills and orchards, snow-gold in the climbing sun.

Dick and Dot, the Bordens, greeted me at the door. In the living room a few people stood holding drinks. Before the others arrived, Dick said, he wanted to show me something, and led me down a long hall to the study. The floor was layered with rugs. There were rugs hanging on the walls and rugs draped across the sofa and chairs. He showed me rugs rolled up in closets and rugs wedged under the desk. He walked me around the room, talking about the acquisition of particular rugs. Visits to dealers in Dubai, to warehouses in Lahore, to Turkish weaving areas. The color in this prayer kilim comes from the roots of certain grasses. You can tell children worked on this Bokhara because the knots aren’t banged down tightly. Dot came in to ask what I wanted to drink, then joined us briefly, happy to trade voices with her husband, to recite stories about bargaining for rugs over jasmine tea, getting rugs through customs, photographing rugs for insurance purposes. Investments, she said. Supply was getting scarce, value was bound to increase, they were buying all they could. War, revolution, ethnic uprisings. Future value, future gain. And in the meantime look how lovely. When she left, Dick got down on his knees to lift the edges of rugs arranged in layers on the floor. Hexagons. Stylized flying birds. Palmette stars. He threw back the edges to show more, the mellow colors of an old kilim made by nomadic weavers, a double prayer-niche that allowed both young and old to pray. He threw back entire rugs to show the full surfaces of what lay beneath, the patterns multiplying inward. He was not thinking of investments now. There were grids and arabesques, gardens in silk and wool. He pointed out multiple backgrounds, borders with formal Kufic lettering, things drawn together in crowded surfaces, a contained and intricate rapture, the desert universe made shapely and complete. He bobbed his smallish, round and almost hairless head, speaking in a soft hypnotic singsong. Geometry, nature and God.The living room was crowded when we got back. I was drinking raki for no good reason. David introduced me to a man named Roy Hardeman. I looked at the wall-hangings, the silk calligraphy. They have a tendency to crowd together in doorways, leaving the cinema for instance. A woman’s voice. One thing I will say for the English, we don’t block exits. Lindsay stood across the room, laughing. What was it about our lives that year we were together that made us so ready to laugh? We were always laughing, it seemed, as if impelled by some quality of the sky on clear nights, the mountains around us, the sea at the foot of Syngrou Street. Hardeman said something. He was a small correct American who stood with his legs together, feet slightly parted. Based in Tunis, David said. Travels widely in North Africa, Western Europe. The pinched face of a killer executive. Dot moved toward me with a bottle three-quarters full. I realized why the name seemed familiar. Refrigeration systems. He was the man who hadn’t showed up the night David and Lindsay went swimming in their clothes. A sandstorm in Cairo, someone had said. But who? Dick went down the hall with three Armenians from Tehran, here to get Canadian visas. I asked David if he’d gone to Frankfurt. He paused to wonder. Charles Maitland entered, full of chummy belligerence. Ann, behind him, looked nervous, over-alert. We were all standing, a stylized fatigue, a form of waking collapse that we agreed to undergo together.Drink and banter made us hungry and someone got together a group of seven or eight for dinner. Sometime later we were down to four, sitting in a club in the Plaka watching a belly dancer named Janet Ruffing, the wife of the operations head at the Mainland Bank. David was astonished. He leaned over to confer with Lindsay. Roy Hardeman had gone across the room to make a phone call, wincing in the noise of drums, flute, amplified guitar and bouzouki. That curious bird-footed stance.”I heard some of them were taking lessons,” Lindsay said, “but I didn’t think it would get this far. This is quite far.””Does Jack Ruffing know?””Of course he knows.””I don’t think he knows,” David said.Hardeman came back to the table and David explained who the dancer was. Everybody seemed to know Jack Ruffing.”Does Jack know?” Hardeman said.”I don’t think he knows.””Hadn’t someone better tell him? Look, I asked an associate to join us for a little last-minute give-and-take. I’m leaving a day sooner than I’d planned.””I wonder if she gets paid,” Lindsay said.Polychrome sateen. Finger cymbals and scarlet lips. We studied her wandering pelvis, watched her lean and toss and vibrate. She was all wrong, long and slender, a white-bodied bending reed, but the cheerfulness of her effort, the shy pleasure she found, made us, made me, instantly willing to overlook the flat belly and slim hips, the earnest mechanics in her movements. What innocence and pluck, a bank wife, to dance in public, her navel fluttering above a turquoise sash. I ordered another drink and tried to recall the word for well-proportioned buttocks.When the dance ended Lindsay went looking for her in a room at the top of the stairs. The musicians took a break, the three men at the table listened to the noise in the street, the motorcycles, the music from discos and nightclubs.”Like to dedicate this medley of tunes to the deposed shah of Iran,” David said, looking into his glass. “I run in the woods every day.””Good country hardball,” Hardeman said.”How is Karen?””She likes it there. She really likes it.””Lindsay likes it here.””She rides,” Hardeman said.”Only keep her out of the desert.””I have a romance with the desert. That’s right, of all people. The desert winds have stirring names.””Lindsay thinks a lot of Karen.””I’ll tell her. That’s good to know. She’ll be pleased.””We may be there in March.””Our whole division moves to London in March.””Sudden.””Hostile oil, both sides.””Not that many options.””We had to facilitate,” Hardeman said.Janet wore a skirt, blouse and cardigan but her makeup was intact, shadows, penciled outlines, arcs and bands of color, a little eerie in the muted light, on a face that was a clear work of household prose. She was happy in a certain way, as someone is happy who learns that her motives are not complicated after all.”It was unexpected,” Lindsay said. “I never thought it would get this far.””I know, it’s crazy. I saw an opening and just went for it.””You were good.””My bellywork isn’t very advanced. I have a lot of work to do on what we call hip isolation. I’m way too conscious of what I’m doing.””What a surprise,” Lindsay said, “to walk in like that and look who’s up there dancing.””People are kind,” Janet said. “It’s sort of an extended tryout.””Haven’t seen Jack,” David said, looking at the woman with carefully measured concern.”Jack’s in the Emirates.””The budget problem. Right, correct.””I do things by rote,” she said to Lindsay. “That’s the only way I can do things. People seem to understand.””Well you were good. I thought you were good.”Lindsay and I listened to her analyze her body in objective terms. I tried to work up a salacious interest, I schemed at it in fact, but she was artless, open and bland, so detached from the murmurous subcurrents, the system of images, that I gave it up. In the end this would become her appeal, her arousing power, this very deadness of intent.A waiter brought drinks, the musicians returned. I liked the noise, the need to talk loud, to lean into people’s faces and enunciate. This was the true party, just beginning, a shouted dialogue lacking sense and purpose. I huddled next to Janet, asking questions about her life, easing my way into her consciousness. Slowly we evolved a mood of curious intimacy, a sympathetic exchange made of misunderstood remarks, our heads nodding in the painted smoke.I was aware of Lindsay’s amused disapproval. It spurred me on, it was sexy, the Mainland wives protecting each other from public shame. The two men played a game with Tunisian coins.”I have to get to know you, Janet.””I’m not even sure who you are. I don’t think I have it quite straight, who belongs to what at this table.””I like it when women call me James.””I don’t do this,” she said.”You don’t do what? I love the way you move.””You know what I mean.””We’re only talking.” Moving my lips, soundlessly.“Only talking?””It’s those wavelike ripples across your belly when you dance. Say belly. I want to watch your lips.””No, honest, I don’t do this.””I know you don’t, I know you don’t.””Do you really because it’s important to me. And with people here I don’t want to give the wrong impression.””Lindsay is special. She’s good people.””I like Lindsay, I really do.””They’ll leave soon. Then you and I can really talk.””I don’t want to really talk. It’s the last thing I want to do.”Folk dancers linking hands across their bodies moved sideways on the small stage.”Your lipstick is cracked in places, which only heightens the effect. I could hardly breathe while you were up there. You were imperfect, even deeply flawed, but what a heartrending American body, how acutely moving. Say thighs. I want to watch your tongue curl up in your painted mouth.””I don’t do this, James.””When women call me James, it gives me an image of myself. It affords me an image. Grownup. At last, I think, I am grown up. She is calling me James. You have gorgeous long legs, Janet. That’s rare today. The way your legs emerged from that silky garment, one at a time, bent ever so slightly. Sheer. A sheer garment.””I really have to leave.””Because at heart, down deep, I’m still twenty-two years old.””Honest, I can’t stay.””How old are you, down deep?””Lindsay’s going to think whatever.””One more drink. We’ll talk about your body. It’s supple, for starters. It has a married poignancy that single carefree bodies can’t even begin to suggest. The suppleness is hard-won. I love your ass.””This means nothing to me.””I know.””If I thought you were serious I’d probably laugh in your face.””You’re shielding yourself from the truth. Because you know I’m serious. And I know you know it. I have to have you, Janet. Don’t you see how you affect me?””No. I totally do not.””Say breasts. Say tongue.””We were two years in Brussels, three and a half years in Rome, a year back in New York and now a year and a half so far in Greece and no one has ever talked to me this way.””I want you. It’s no longer a question of choice, a question of actual wanting. We’ve gone beyond that. You know it, I know it. I want what’s inside that cardigan, that skirt. What kind of panties are you wearing? If you don’t tell me, I’ll reach right under there and pull them off your legs. Then I’ll put them in my pocket. They’ll be mine. That vivid and intimate thing, that object.”Lindsay, turned away from us toward the stage, was still our listener, our auditor, and in everything we said there was acknowledgment of this, although she couldn’t hear a word, of course, through the flutes and bouzoukis. A dancer leaped, struck his black boot with the palm of his hand, in midair, slapped it hard.”Here’s what I want to say about your makeup.””No, please.””It’s compelling without being sexy or lurid. That’s the odd thing. It’s a statement of some sort, isn’t it? The body is supple, open, airy and free. The face is masked, almost bitterly masked. I’m not the kind of man who tells women who they are or what they mean, so we’ll just let it lay, we’ll let it rest, the face, the mask, the cracked scarlet.””I don’t do this. What am I doing listening to this? Not to mention I have to go to the ladies room.””Let me go with you. I want to. Please.””I’m not so indecisive I can’t get up and go home. It’s just a sleepiness that keeps me here.””I know. I know exactly.””Are you sleepy too?””That’s it exactly. A sleepiness.”She put a hand to my face, briefly, and looked at me with a strange sympathy, an understanding of something that applied to us both. Then she went downstairs, where the toilets were.I looked diagonally across the table to see the great Balkan head of Andreas Eliades. He sat talking to Hardeman. Remember. We’d sat with four glasses of brandy in that seaside taverna, waiting for David and Lindsay to come up from the beach. Hardeman’s name, Hardeman’s plane, a sandstorm in Cairo. In the passing of time, that night seemed to deepen its weave. It was like a mingled reminiscence I carried with me, the selective memories of those who were there. Moments kept coming back to me, precise textures, the brand names of cigarettes, the old guitarist’s eyes, his seamed brown hand, and what the Bordens said, and who plucked a grape from the wet bunch, and where people sat, how we rearranged ourselves around the table as the evening passed through its own solid objects to become what it is now. Eliades seemed more and more the means of some connection.We nodded to each other and I made a scattered gesture to indicate I didn’t know what I was doing in a place like this. I realized Lindsay was looking at me. She sat straight across from me, an empty chair on either side of her. Andreas was at the far end, facing Hardeman, who had moved.I said to Andreas, “We keep running into each other.”He shrugged, I shrugged.David was between Hardeman and me. Janet’s chair was to my left. Where people sat seemed important to me, although I didn’t know why.”Don’t stare,” I said to Lindsay. “It makes me feel you’re making up your mind about something.””About going home,” she said. “Whose idea was this anyway?””Somebody wanted to see Greek dancing.”Andreas asked her whether she was learning verbs. Another memory, a fragment of that summer night. They tried to chat politely through the amplified sound. David leaned my way to fix me with a sad-eyed look.”We haven’t talked,” he said.”I know.””I wanted to talk. We never get to talk.””We’ll talk soon. We’ll talk tomorrow. We’ll have lunch.”When he and Lindsay were gone I didn’t move closer to the two men and when Janet Ruffing came back to the table she sat in Lindsay’s chair. It was like a board game. Two sets of people facing each other, two sets of empty chairs. Hardeman ordered another round.”They’re talking business,” I said to her. “Shipments, tonnage.””Who is the bearded man?””Business. A businessman.””He looks like one of those priests.””He’s having an affair with Ann Maitland, probably. Do you know her?””Why would you tell me something like that?””I’d tell you anything tonight. There are no strategies. I mean it. I’d tell you anything, I’d do anything for you.””But why?””The way you danced.””But you said I wasn’t very good.””The way you moved, your legs, your breasts, what you are. Never mind technique. What you are, how pleased you were with yourself.””But I don’t think that’s true.””How pleased you were. I insist on that.””I almost think in a roundabout way you’re trying to bring out my vanity.””You’re not vain, you’re hopeful. Vanity is a defensive quality. It contains an element of fear. It’s a look into the future, into wasting away and death.” Another dancer leaped. “I’m at that certain stage in a night of drinking and talking when I see things clearly through a small opening, a window in space. I know things. I know what we’re going to say before we say it.””What did Lindsay say?””She only looked at me.””Are these bank people?””Refrigerators.””They’re going to wonder what we’re saying.””I’d like to walk out of here with your panties in my back pocket. You’d have to follow me, wouldn’t you? I’d like to slip my hand under your blouse and detach your bra. I want to sit here and talk to you knowing I’ve got your bra and panties in my pocket. That’s all I ask. The knowledge of a bareness under your clothes. Knowing that, sitting here talking to you and knowing you were naked under your clothes, this would enable me to live another ten years, this knowledge alone, independent of food and drink. Are you wearing a bra in fact? I’m not one of those men who can tell at a glance. I’ve never had the self-assured powers of observation that would allow me to say that this or that woman was or was not wearing a bra. As a kid I never stood on street corners and estimated cup measurements. There goes a C cup, like that, with total self-assurance.””Please. I think I ought to go.””Only to put my hands under your clothes. No more than that. What we did as kids, adolescent sex, how happy that would make me. A back room in your family’s summer bungalow. A mildewed room, a darkening, a sudden rain. Move against me, push me off, pull me onto you again. Worried about someone coming back, back from the lake, the yard sale. Worried about everything we’re doing. The rain loosens every fresh smell in the countryside. It comes in on us from outdoors, rain-fresh, rain-washed, lovely, sweet-smelling, a chill in the summer air. It’s nature, it’s sex. And you pull me onto you and worry and tell me not to, not to. See how sentimental I am. How cheap and indecent. They’re coming back from the lakeside bar, the one on stilts called Mickey’s Landing, where you wait on tables when you’re feeling bored.””But the dancing isn’t sexy to me. It’s not that at all.””I know that, I know, it’s part of the point, part of the reason I want you so badly, your long, white and well-meaning body.””Oh thanks.””Your body has won out over marriage. It’s better for the experience. It’s wildly beautiful. How old are you, thirty-five?””Thirty-four.””Wearing a cardigan. Is a cardigan what women wear when they don’t want to talk about themselves?””How can I talk? This isn’t real to me.””You danced. That was real.””I don’t do this.””You danced. This talk we’re having means nothing to you and everything to me. You danced, I didn’t. I’m trying to return to you some idea of how deeply you affected me, dancing, barefoot, in arm-length gloves, in filmy things, and of how you affect me right now, sitting here, so hard to find under the eyeshadow, the mascara, the lip gloss, the lipstick. The way you sit here unmoved by our talking excites hell out of me.””I’m not unmoved.””I want to reach you in the most direct of ways. I want you to say to yourself, ‘He is going to do something and I don’t know what it is but I want him to do it.’ Janet.”We were all drinking Scotch. Andreas still in his raincoat.”Your voice, when you were telling us about your body, about the lessons, the practices, the hips do this, the belly does that, your voice was four inches outside your body, it began at a point about four inches beyond your lips.””I don’t know what you mean.””There’s a lack of connection between your words and the physical action they describe, the parts of the body they describe. This is what draws me to you so intensely. I want to put your voice back inside your body, where it belongs.””How do you do that?” A half smile, skeptical and tired.”By making you see yourself in a different way, I guess. By making you see me, making you feel the heat of my wanting. Do you feel it? Tell me if you do. I want to hear you say it. Say heat. Say wet between my legs. Say legs. Seriously, I want you to. Stockings. Whisper it. The word is meant to be whispered.””I can sit and listen to you and I can tell myself this is real and I can tell myself he means it. But it’s just so foreign to me. I don’t know the responses.””James. Call me James.””Oh shit please.””Use names, ” I said.”No more drinks. I don’t do this.””Neither one of us wants to go home. We want to put off going home. We want to stay here awhile longer. I’d forgotten what it was like, not wanting to go home. Of course I don’t have to go home. That worrisome small force isn’t pulling at me, as it pulls at you. What is waiting there that you don’t want to face?” We sat awhile, thinking about this. “I’m trying to express what you’re feeling, what we’re both feeling. If I can do that, you may begin to trust me in the deepest way. The way that complicates, that envelops. So that when you want to stop what we’re doing, the shove and force and direction of the whole night, you won’t be able to.””I wonder if you would recognize me on the street, tomorrow, without this makeup I’m wearing. Even stranger, I wonder if I would recognize you.””The glare would be immense, the broad sunlight. We’d want to run from each other.”Greeks from the audience were on stage now, dancing, and soon tourists began approaching the edges of the platform, carrying purses with them and shoulder bags and wearing sea captain’s hats, looking back at friends—looks that begged encouragement for some stupidity they thought they were about to invent.”They’ll be closing soon,” she said. “I think it’s really time.”She went upstairs to get her coat. I stood listening to Hardeman talk about maintenance feasibility. Andreas, attending to these remarks, took a card out of some inner pocket and extended it to me without looking up. A simple business card. I offered Hardeman some money, which he waved off, and then Janet and I went into the street.There wasn’t space to hold the sound. It crowded the night, dense waves of it, heavy with electrified force. It came out of the walls and pavement and wooden doors, the pulse of some undefined event, and we walked up the stepped street, into it, her arm linked with mine.A man with cowhide bagpipes stood playing in the window of a small taverna. This music was a condition of the air, the weather of these old streets at half past one in the morning, and I edged her into a wall and kissed her. She looked away, her mouth smeared, saying we had to go down the other way, to the bottom of the steps, where the taxis were, if there were any. I pulled her up higher past the cabarets, the last of the Cretan dancers, the last of the singers in open shirts, and held her against the second of the old walls of falling buildings. She looked at me in a near grimace of wondering, a speculation that had the shock of waking about it, of trying to recall a somber dream. Who was he, what were we doing there? I pressed her against the wall, trying to open her coat. She said we had to get a taxi, she had to get home. I put my hand between her legs, over the skirt, and she seemed to sink a little, her head turned against the wall. I tried to get her to hold the edges of my coat to keep us covered, keep us out of the cold, while I worked at my pants. She broke away, running down some steps past a scaffold set against an old building. She ran holding her handbag by the strap and well away from her body as if it held something she thought might spill on her. She turned a corner and went uphill now, into an empty street. When I reached her and put my arms around her from behind she stood motionless. I moved my hands down her belly over the skirt and placed my knees behind hers, making her bend slightly, dip into me. She said something, then shook away and walked out of the dim light toward the wall. I pressed her against the wall. The music was far away and fading by degrees as places closed. I kissed her, lifted her skirt. Voices below us, a laughing man.She said to me, she whispered with uncanny clarity, “People just want to be held. It’s enough to be held, isn’t it?”I paused, then used my knees to move her legs apart. I worked in stages, trying to reason it, to maneuver things correctly. We took short breaths, our mouths together, as we urged each other into a rhythm and a need. I worked at her clothes, my mind racing blankly. I felt the warmth in her buttocks and thighs and I moved her toward me. She seemed to be thinking past this moment, finished with it, watching herself in a taxi heading home.”Janet Ruffing.””I don’t do this. I don’t.”We stood under an iron balcony, in the upper sector of the old town, beneath the rock mass of the north slope of the Acropolis.

10

the germans are sitting in the sun. The Swedes drift by, heads tilted sunward, an eagerness in their faces that resembles pain. The two women from Holland stand against the wall of the harborfront church, eyes closed, feeling the warmth on their faces and necks. The man we keep seeing, the one in the white linen cap, stands in a patch of sun in the Turkish cemetery, among the pines and eucalyptus, peeling an orange. The Swedes move out of sight, heading toward the aquarium. The English appear, carrying their coats into the empty square, where shadows begin to extend from the Venetian arcade, in the strange silence, the late morning light.Three days in Rhodes. David decides it is warm enough to swim. We watch him enter, moving slowly forward, shoulders swinging, arms raised to chest level when the water reaches his midsection, the blond body, as he surfaces after the plunge, seeming to leap toward the Turkish hills, seven miles off. We sit on a low wall above the beach. The beach is empty except for boys with a spotted soccer ball. The pages of a paperback book turn in the wind. The man in the white cap comes by, asking us where he can find the museum of fish.David’s swim leaves a space which we are meant to fill with serious talk. But Lindsay seems content to look out to sea. It is that kind of holiday. The long sightlines, the emptiness, the building wind.After the second of his long punishing swims he comes up the beach looking four inches shorter, walking deep in sand. When he raises his head we see how happy he is to be breathing heavily and sea-beaten and freezing, his wife and his friend waiting with a hotel towel.The next day it rains, and the day after, which reduces the mood to a purer state. I begin to see that these days are connected mysteriously to Kathryn. They are Kathryn’s days.On the afternoon of the third day a storm approaches. It comes from the east and we stand on the breakwater near the old tower to watch the waves hit gleaming on the rocks. An immense graveness fills the air. The seaward stir of clouds and glassy dusk brings on a charged luminescence, a stormlight that does not fall upon objects so much as it emanates from them. The buildings begin to glow, the governor’s palace, the belltower, the new market. As the sky goes black the white boats shine, the bronze deer shine, the gold stone of the law courts and bank emits a painted light. Water comes surging over the high wall. There is no light except in objects.Coming home, flying low over islands crouched in the haze, we began suddenly to talk.”Why do I miss my countries?” David said. “My countries are either terrorist playpens or they’re viciously anti-American or they’re huge tracts of economic and social and political wreckage.””Sometimes all of those,” Lindsay said.”Why can’t I wait to get back into it? Why am I so eager? A hundred percent inflation, twenty percent unemployment. I love deficit countries. I love going in there, being intimately involved.””Too intimately, some might say.””You can’t be too intimate with a Syrian, a Lebanese,” he told me.”When they allow you to monitor their economic policies in return for a loan. When you reschedule a debt and it amounts to an aid program.””These things help, they genuinely help stabilize the region. We do things for our countries. Our countries are interesting. I can’t get interested in Spain, for instance.””I can’t get interested in Italy.””Spain should be interesting. The violence is not sickening like the violence in India. But I can’t get interested.””Indian violence is random. Is that what you mean?””I don’t know what I mean.””I can’t get interested in the Horn of Africa,” I said.”The Horn of Africa is happening. Rhodesia is happening. But we can’t get interested.””What about Afghanistan? Is that one of your countries?””It’s a non-presence country. No office but we do business, a little. Iran is different. Collapsed presence, collapsed business. A black hole in other words. But I want everyone to know I retain a measure of affection.”This was the period after the President ordered a freeze of Iranian assets held in U.S. banks. Desert One was still to come, the commando raid that ended two hundred and fifty miles from Tehran. It was the winter Rowser learned that the Shi’ite underground movement, Dawa, was stockpiling weapons in the Gulf. It was the winter before the car bombings in Nablus and Ramallah, before the military took power in Turkey, tanks in the streets, soldiers painting over wall slogans. It was before Iraqi ground troops moved into Iran at four points along the border, before the oilfields burned and the sirens sounded through Baghdad, through Rashid Street and the passageways of the souks, before the blackouts, the masking of headlights, people hurrying out of teahouses, off the double-decker buses.All around us the human noise, the heat of a running crowd.

Food and drink were the center of almost every human contact I had in Greece and the region. Eating, talking across rickety wooden tables, marble-top tables, tables with paper covering, wrought-iron tables, tables set together on a pebbled surface by the sea. One of the mysteries of the Aegean is that things seem more significant than they do elsewhere, deeper, more complete in themselves. Those of us pressed together around the joined tables were raised in each other’s estimation to a higher light perhaps, an amplitude that may or may not have been our natural due. The food itself was a serious thing, simple as it often was, eaten with dwarf cutlery from shared plates, an effort of our single will to be where we were, extravagant in our belief in each other’s distinctiveness and worth. We never had to summon a sense of occasion. It was in and around us all the time.Andreas took me to a taverna in a half-finished street in a remote district. The place specialized in heart, brains, kidneys and intestines. I decided this choice of eating place had not been made casually. The evening was to be a lesson in seriousness, in authentic things, whatever is beyond a pale understanding, whatever persuades the complacent to see what is around them. He would use these parts of the animal’s body to decorate his text. This is the real thing, kokorétsi, the spit-roasted entrails of the beast. These are Greeks, who eat it.On the other hand maybe it was just another dinner in a smoky room with homemade wine in tin mugs, distinguishable from a hundred other dinners not by the food so much as by the intensity of the conversation. His conversation. His furious, good-humored, incessant and maddening talk.He was not settled until he put his cigarette and his lighter on the table in front of him. I felt almost threatened by the gesture. Serious. A serious evening.”Why are we having dinner, Andreas?””I want to find out about your Greek. You said you were learning Greek. I want to find out if you are happy here.””Not that people need a reason to eat.””I am always interested in talking to Americans.””Roy Hardeman.””Professional duty. I am not so interested. He’s a good manager, very smart, but we only talk about the job. He could be a Frenchman, a German, and I would hardly notice. I don’t think there’s any nationality in companies such as ours. This is submerged.””I can’t imagine you submerging your nationality.””Okay, maybe this is why we are here. To make things clear once again. To show our status.””You need someone to rail at. Why not a Frenchman or German?””Not so much fun.””A waiter said to us on Rhodes the other day, he said, ‘You Americans are fools. You had the Germans down and you let them up. They were down and you did not crush them. Now look. Everywhere.’‘”But he takes their money. We all take each other’s money. This is the role of the present government. Take the Americans’ money, do what the Americans tell us to do. It is breathtaking, how they submit, how they let American strategic interests take precedence over the lives of Greeks.””It’s your government, not ours.””I am not so sure. Of course we have experience in these matters. Humiliation is the theme of Greek affairs. Foreign interference is taken for granted. It is assumed we could not survive without it. The occupation, the blockades, the forces landing in Piraeus, the humiliating treaties, the distribution of influence among the powers. What would we talk about if not about this? Where would we find the drama that is so essential to our lives?””You realize your irony is fixed in considerable truth. Of course you do. Forgive me.””For a long time our politics have been determined by the interests of the great powers. Now it is just the Americans who determine.””What is this I’m eating?””I will tell you. Brains.””Not bad.””Do you like it? Good. I come here when I’m tense. When my job is crushing my spirit. Something like this, you know. Misery, depression. I come here and eat brains and kidneys.””You realize the trouble with Greece. Greece is strategically located.””We have noticed,” he said.”So it’s only natural the major powers have taken a close interest. What do you expect? My boss once said to me in his nervous raspy way, ‘Power works best when it doesn’t distinguish friends from enemies.’ The man is a living Buddha.””I think he must be running American policy. Our future does not belong to us. It is owned by the Americans. The Sixth Fleet, the men who command the bases on our soil, the military officers who fill the U.S. embassy, the political officers who threaten to stop the economic aid, the businessmen who threaten to stop investing, the bankers who lend money to Turkey. Millions for the Turks, all decided in Athens.””Not by me, Andreas.””Not by you. We are repeatedly sold out, taken lightly, deceived, totally ignored. Always in favor of the Turks. The famous tilt. It happened in Cyprus, it happens every day in NATO.””You’re obsessed by the Turks. It’s a spiritual need. Are they even remotely interested in you?””They seem to be remotely interested in our islands, our air space.””Strategy.””American strategy. This is interesting, how the Americans choose strategy over principle every time and yet keep believing in their own innocence. Strategy in Cyprus, strategy in the matter of the dictatorship. The Americans learned to live with the colonels very well. Investments flourished under the dictatorship. The bases stayed open. Small arms shipments continued. Crowd control, you know?””They were your colonels, Andreas.””Are you sure of that? This is interesting to me, the curious connection between Greek and American intelligence agencies.””Why curious?””The Greek government doesn’t know what goes on between them.””What makes you think the American government knows?This is the nature of intelligence, isn’t it? The final enemy is government. Only government threatens their existence.””The nature of power. The nature of intelligence. You have studied these things. Where, in your apartment in Kolonaki?””How do you know I live there?””Where else would you live but there?””The views are nice.””The bidet of America, we call this place. Do you want to hear the history of foreign interference in this century alone?””No.””Good. I don’t have time to recite it.”In the end he did recite it. He recited everything, interrupting his meal several times to light cigarettes, order more wine. I enjoyed myself even in the sweep of judgment and enormous accusation. He had made an occupation of these matters, he had taken pains, and I think he was eager to vent his scholarship. Diligence, comprehensiveness. He was a student of Greek things. It occurred to me that all Greeks were, both in and out of politics and war. Being small and exposed, being strategic. They had a sense of the frailty of their own works, the identifying energies and signs, and they instructed each other as a form of mutual reassurance.”Does your boss tell you that power must be blind in both eyes? You don’t see us. This is the final humiliation. The occupiers fail to see the people they control.””Come on, Andreas.””Bloody hell, nothing happens without the approval of the Americans. And they don’t even know there is a grievance. They don’t know we are tired of the situation, the relationship.””You’ve had five or six years of calm. Is this too long for Greeks?””Look how deep we are involved in the comedy. To make concessions to Turks for the sake of harmony in NATO. All arranged by Americans. Americans have played the game badly in Greece.””And your mistakes. All your mistakes are discussed in terms of acts of nature. The catastrophe in Asia Minor. The disastrous events in Cyprus. This is the language of earthquakes and floods. But Greeks caused these things to happen.””Cyprus is problematical. I will say this only because there is no documentary evidence. But one day the facts of U.S. involvement will emerge. I am certain.””What am I eating?””This is the stomach, the stomach lining.””Interesting.””I don’t know if I would call it interesting. It’s a sheep’s stomach, you know. Usually I come here alone. It has a certain meaning for me. Brains, intestines. I don’t know if you can understand. Did you ever see a Greek when he dances alone? This is private, a private moment. I’m a little crazy, I think. I need a moment of eating sheep’s brains now and then.”The owner stood over us, totaling the bill in machine-gun Greek. We went somewhere for dessert, somewhere else for drinks. At two in the morning we walked the streets looking for a cab. Andreas told me about events leading up to this and that and the other calamity. Whenever he had a point to make he stopped walking and seized my wrist. This happened four or five times on a single windy street. Talk came out of him like the product of some irreversible technology. We’d stand briefly in the dark, then start up again, heading toward a boulevard somewhere. He was full of night vigor, a common property of Athenians. Ten paces he’d stop again. Nuclear stockpiles, secret protocols. His politics were a form of wakefulness, the alerting force in a life that might otherwise pass him by.”What do you want me to do, Andreas?””I want you to argue,” he said. “It may be an hour before a taxi comes.”From the small balcony off my bedroom I looked into a room across the courtyard, a little below me. A bright day, shutters open, the room being aired. Self-possessed, a woman’s room, a woman’s shoes on the floor. I was in shadows, the room in clear light, utterly still, a cool space of objects and tones. What a mystery her absence was, full of unformed questions. There was something final in the scene, a deep calm, as though things had been arranged to be gazed on. Shouldn’t a scene like this be marked by expectation? The woman will enter? She will enter drying her hair in a towel, bringing into the room so many things at once, so much affective motion, a lifetime’s shattering of composed space, that it is possible to believe you know everything about her, just in that bundling of head and arms, that careless entrance, barefoot, in a loose robe. Alluring. This is what I missed. When the light changed, later, I would look again.My landlord, Hadjidakis, was standing in the lobby. He was a short heavy man who enjoyed speaking English. Almost everything he said in English struck him as funny, almost every sentence ended in a laugh. He seemed happily disconcerted, making these strange sounds. After we’d greeted each other he told me he’d just seen a group of riot policemen assembled near the center of town. Nothing seemed to be going on. They were simply there, about forty of them, in their white visored helmets, black uniforms, carrying riot shields, guns and clubs. As he told the story Hadjidakis kept laughing. All the facts in the story were separated by the sound of his laughter. It was an odd juxtaposition, of course, the riot police and the laughter. The story in English had an eerie dimension it wouldn’t have had in Greek. And the sight of those shields and clubs had made an impact on him.”It gave me an emotion,” he said, and we both laughed.When I came down the next day with a suitcase, the concierge stood in the dimness, his right hand twisted in the air, the gesture of destinations.China, I told him, Kina, not knowing the word for Kuwait.I rode out to the airport with Charles Maitland, who was going to Beirut to see about a job as security officer with the British embassy there.”I was saying to Ann. They keep changing the names.””What names?””The names we grew up with. The countries, the images. Persia for one. We grew up with Persia. What a vast picture that name evoked. A vast carpet of sand, a thousand turquoise mosques. A vastness, a cruel glory extending back centuries. All the names. A dozen or more and now Rhodesia of course. Rhodesia said something. For better or worse it was a name that said something. What do they offer in its place? Linguistic arrogance, I suggested to her. She called me a comedian. She has no personal memory of Persia as a name. But then she’s younger, isn’t she?”We floated past the Olympic Stadium.”There’s something to it, you know. This sweeping arrogance. Overthrow, re-speak. What do they leave us with? Ethnic designations. Sets of initials. The work of bureaucrats, narrow minds. I find I take these changes quite personally. They’re a rescinding of memory. Every time another people’s republic emerges from the dust, I have the feeling someone has tampered with my childhood.””You can’t prefer Leopoldville to Kinshasa.””The Ministry of Slogans. The Ministry of Obscure Dialects.””Zimbabwe,” I said. “A drumbeat.””A drumbeat. That’s just it, you see.””That’s just what?””A drumbeat, a drumbeat.”Our driver eased into a gray line of taxis stretching down the thoroughfare. A woman and maimed child walked along the divide from car to car, begging. The light changed. We were almost to the airport when Charles spoke again.”I heard about the belly dancing.””Yes.””An interesting night, was it?””Do you know her?””I know her husband,” he said, and when he looked at me his jaw was tight and strong and I wondered if we were fixed in some near symmetry of friendships and adulteries. We walked through the doors into the towering noise of the terminal.Two phone calls.The first came the night I got back from Kuwait. The phone rang twice, then stopped. A little later it rang again. I hadn’t been able to sleep. It was two in the morning, shutters banging in the wind.Ann’s voice.”This will seem strange, I know.””Are you all right?””Well, yes, but I’ve been putting this off and putting it off.””Is Charles still in Beirut?””He stayed on. We have friends there. He’s fine. It isn’t Charles, it isn’t me exactly.”For a moment I thought she wanted to invite herself over. I studied the wooden surface of the table the phone was on. In the stillness before she spoke again I concentrated intently.”It’s about this man I’ve been seeing. It’s about him actually.”I waited, then said, “Andreas. This is the man you’re talking about.”She waited. “How interesting, James. Then you know.” Waited. “Yes, it’s about him I’ve been wanting to speak to you. Did I wake you? How stupid to call at this hour. But it’s been absolutely pressing in on me. I couldn’t sleep. I had to tell you, I finally decided. It may be pure imagination but what if it isn’t, I thought.” Waited. “How interesting, that you know.”The voice was rough-edged and faint. She would be sitting beneath the African mask, a drink at her right hand.”We’ve talked about you,” she said. “Every so often he asks. A question about your job one day. A question about your friends, your background, small things, falling more or less naturally into the conversation. At first I barely noticed. It was one subject among many. But lately I’ve begun to think his interest in you may be special. Something enters the conversation. A suspense, I think I’ll call it. There’s a curious silence in his waiting for my responses. And he watches me. I’ve begun to notice how he watches. He’s a watchful man, isn’t he?””I like Andreas.””He keeps bringing up your job. I’ve told him I haven’t the foggiest idea what you do. All right, he changes the subject. But eventually it comes up again, perhaps a bit more directly the second time, a bit clumsily even. ‘Why is his main office in Washington?’ ‘Andreas, I’ve no idea. Why don’t you ask him?’ Clearly he thinks you’re someone who merits attention.””He also thought I was David Keller, didn’t he, at dinner that night. You were right there. He had us mixed up, remember? I was the unscrupulous banker.””He mentions something called the Northeast Group.””That’s the firm I work for. It’s part of a monster corporation. A wholly owned subsidiary, I think is the phrase.””If I might ask, James, what exactly do you do? Not your company but you. When you travel.””Generally I do reviews. I examine figures, make decisions.””Well, see, that’s so vague.””The higher the post, the vaguer the job. The people with specific duties need someone to send their telexes to. I’m a presence.””He mentions all the travel you do. He mentions the tiny staff you have in Athens. Just a secretary, is this correct? He wonders why your main office is in Washington and not New York. He does his best not to be direct. He rather worms these subjects into the conversation. The more I think about it, the more obvious it all seems. But I didn’t know how to tell you.””What else does he mention?””He mentions a book you wrote on military strategy.””Ghost-wrote. All I did was organize some facts. How the hell does he know about that?””That’s it, you see.””I wrote a lot of things, a dozen subjects.””I think he’s read the book.””Then he knows more than I do. I can’t remember a word of it. It was grammar and syntax to me. Why didn’t he mention it? I saw him a week ago.””Something enters the conversation when we talk about you.” Waiting. “Do you hear the wind?””He can’t be gathering information for someone. Nobody’s that amateurish. And there’s nothing to gather. What is there to gather?””Maybe I’m wrong,” she said. “We’ve talked about other people as well. Sometimes at length. I could be imagining.””I like Andreas. There’s a size to him. There’s a force. He has deep feelings and deep suspicions and he should have them, why shouldn’t he, when you consider events, when you consider history. I can’t see what he’d be up to, doing this. He’s with a multinational. They’re based in Bremen or Essen or someplace.””Bremen.””It doesn’t add up.””Well, then, I’m imagining.””Unless he has friends on one of the left-wing papers here. Maybe he’s playing amateur spy. The Communist papers like to print the names of foreign correspondents they think are tied to U.S. intelligence.””It doesn’t seem like him.””No, it doesn’t.””What do I want to say? He’s so human?””Yes.””He is, you know. He has large feelings, as you say, but they pass very easily into a gentleness, a sympathy. How I would hate to think I was being used.””It’s not that way,” I said. “If he wanted information, he couldn’t possibly expect to get it without my finding out.””Unless he thought I wouldn’t tell you.””But you have.””Isn’t it awful? He thought I’d be so smitten.””It’s not that way. There’s an explanation. He said he’d call. I won’t even try to get in touch. I’ll wait for him to call.””He mentioned several other things in connection with your activities.””My activities? Do I have activities? I thought it was his activities we were concerned about.””The more I reflect, the more I think I’m imagining.””He said he’d call. I’ll give him every chance to explain before I bring it up. When will you see him again?””He said he’d call. But he hasn’t.””He will. What about Charles? What about the job in Beirut?””I don’t think so,” she said.”Were you willing to go back?””There?” She sounded surprised that I would ask.”Then why would he bother seeing about a job?””To take taxis across the Green Line. To light up in a bloody great smile when Israeli jets break the sound barrier. He loves the roar, the boom. To pretend to be unaffected when the guns start firing round the corner. That’s why he went.”The worn voice began to acquire a certain disregarding impetus. Soon it would fall into monologue, an inner speech that did not need a context or listener.”To sit there with his beer, chatting with a colleague as the mortars rain down or whatever they do. Absolutely unmoved. I think he lived for such moments. They were the high points of Lebanon, as demonstrations were the high points of Panama when we were there. During the worst of the anti-American demonstrations he’d put on his Union Jack lapel badge and go walking right into it. How I came to hate that badge. He truly felt he couldn’t be harmed, wearing it. And so he sits in someone’s office in Beirut when the militiamen are active. To betray no sign of emotion. To chat. What’s the point of getting excited, he liked to say to me. Truly believing there is good sense in this. As if getting excited had something to do with deciding to get excited, making a conscious decision to get excited. They’re out there hurling grenades, firing rockets. What’s the point of getting excited? What’s the point?”The second call came from Del Nearing moments before I left for the office. She was in a phone booth off the main square in Argos, the Peloponnese, waiting for the Athens bus. She just thought I’d like to know.

We sat in the living room.”Whose furniture?””Rented,” I said.”What do you have to eat?””Nothing. We’ll go out.””When?””Eight-thirty, nine.””You live like me,” she said. “Hard to believe I’ll be home in a day or two. I actually enjoyed the bus trip here. The bus was going somewhere. I knew where it was going.””You lost weight.””California. I need to tone up my orgasm. What is this I’m drinking, Jim? Jeem, I should say.” I took this to be her pronunciation of the Arabic letter jim. “Did you have a nice day at the office, Jeem? Is this marble floor real marble, Jeem?”She wore boots, jeans and a sweatshirt with the arms cut off. Her feet rested on the coffee table. She was drinking kumquat brandy, which I’d been trying to get rid of for months.”Where is Frank?” I said.”Where is Frank. All right, since you’re buying me dinner and letting me spend the night. Is that all right with you, Jeem? I spend the night? Separate rooms? Just so I don’t have to go to another hotel?””Of course.””Well, he’s still there. He’s crisscrossing the mountain. Andahl didn’t show up where he was supposed to. There was no meeting, no sign of him or them or anyone. The first week Frank kept saying he’d give it one more day. Pathetic. I really wanted to stay. I tried very hard. One more day, one more day. He started exploring the area north of the towers. Up where the range broadens and you lose the sea. Terrible roads, no roads at all. Rusty oak trees, gunshots all the time. I began to feel there was something deeply wasteful in all this. But what can you say to Frank once he’s in? First I went with him. Then I stayed in the hotel. The second week he didn’t say much of anything and neither did I. He kept finding another dirt track, another village. Asking people, making gestures, pointing to names on the map. I felt there was something dead, there was an emptiness at the center of all this. I tried to explain but I didn’t know how and he wasn’t listening anyway. So I just thought to hell with it. Let the man do what he has to. And I went to see about getting myself on out of there.””I wonder about Andahl, if they found him, if he decided to disappear.””Nazi backpackers. That’s all they are.””I think about the movie now and then. I see it at times. As Frank described it. Strong images. That landscape. He’ll never find them, we’ll never know if he was right.””You mean that it works as a film, the way they live?””Yes, that it fits the screen. I do see it at times, powerfully.””Film. Why do I want to throw up when I hear the term ‘personal film’? ‘He does personal films.’ ‘He makes personal statements.’ ‘He has a personal vision.’‘”I knew they wouldn’t meet him. How could people like that be interested in somebody’s film, somebody’s book?””You were right. They were true to themselves.”I noted the dry tone. I told her it was strange, how right I’d been. I’d been right all along. I figured out the pattern. I figured out Andahl was a runaway. I told Frank the cultists wouldn’t appear and they hadn’t appeared.She looked at me in the dimness.”What pattern?” she said.”The way they work. The whole mechanism. The whole point. It’s the alphabet.””But you didn’t tell Frank.””No, I didn’t.””You kept it to yourself.””That’s right.” ‘We sat there. I liked watching the large room turn dark as evening deepened. She didn’t say anything. I thought she must be cold, being bare-armed, the heat only beginning to rise through the building. The phone rang twice.”I’m not sure what was behind it,” I said. “I guess Kathryn. Whatever there was between them.””What was there between them?””I’m sure he talked about us, all three of us. You would know better than I.””All these years you’ve nursed this thing? Not letting either of them know you suspected an affair, or whatever you suspected? A night? An afternoon?””I let her know. She knows.””But when you had a chance to get back at him, you took it.You knew something he didn’t know, something important to him. How did it make you feel, Jeem, keeping the secret?””That’s part of it. The secret. It meant something to me, discovering the secret. I wasn’t in a hurry to pass it on. I felt this knowledge was special. It had to be earned. It was too important to be given away. He had to earn it. Owen Brademas wouldn’t tell him either. He only hinted to Frank. It would have been easy to tell him. But he didn’t tell him. The knowledge is special. Once you have it, you find yourself protective of it. It confers a cult-hood of its own.”We sat quietly for a while.”All right. Do you want me to tell you what there was between them, what went on, if anything?””No,” I said.”You’d rather nurse it along.””I’d rather not know. Simple as that.”After dinner we returned to sit in the same chairs. I left the hall light on. She described her apartment, how it seemed these past months to be the only settled thing in her life, the only stillness. Small, furnished sparely, in soft light, waiting. A woman’s things. She might have been the woman who comes walking into that room across the courtyard, the serene space I had watched from my balcony. Maybe this is why I went to sit on the sofa, leaning toward Del to hold her face in my hands, framing the perfect features, the wide mouth and tilted eyes, the cropped hair tailing over her ears.”You like me, Jeem? Maybe you think I give you good time. Tell me what you like. You like dirty, you like filthy? What we do, Jeem? Say to me in little words. I don’t do all the words. Some words I can do, some I don’t like to do so much. They are very big, these words, hard to do. But some men like. You must tell me, Jeem. We do big words or little words?””I thought all the words were little.””You are funny man, Jeem. They did not tell me this in the mountains.””He won’t stay two days,” I said. “The search is as good as over.””Why this is, Jeem?””You’re not there anymore. You go, he goes. He’ll do a certain amount of serious bitching and moaning. Then he’ll give in to it. He’ll give in to knowing he has to have you with him. That’s when he’ll pack and leave.””I think I must be real woman, if it is true what you say.”Deadpan, a humorless voice. The moment was false. It had a specious feel to it. I realized I’d approached her, touched the edges of her face, moved my thumbs across her lips (listening to the whorish voice) not for the touch itself or because I wanted something simple from her, the scant body folded in mine. Her voice went on, mocking both of us. I sat back in the sofa, my feet on the table at a right angle to hers, my hands folded behind my neck. She folded her hands behind her neck.I’d wanted to strike at Volterra. Sex with his woman. How primally satisfying. I didn’t tell her this. She would be unsurprised, prone to make a joke, invent another voice as I’d invented voices during the week of the 27 Depravities. But it pained me to be silent. I always want to confess to women.Completing your revenge. Hiding it even from yourself at times. Not willing to be seen taking your small mean everyday revenge.She had one last thing to say before we went to our separate beds. If there was something I hadn’t told Volterra, there was also something he had kept from me.”He had no plans to shoot in sequence except for the ending. The ending would be the last thing he’d shoot. He told me how he’d do it. He wanted a helicopter. He wanted the cult members and their victim arranged for the murder. The pattern has been followed to this point, the special knowledge you talk about. The old shepherd is in place and the murderers are in place, with sharpened stones in their hands. Frank shoots down from as close in as the helicopter can safely get. He wants the wind blast, the blast from the rotor blades. They murder the old man. They kill him with stones. Cut him, beat him. The dust is flying, the bushes and scrub are flattened out by the rotor. No sound in this scene. He wants the wind blast only as a visual element, The severe angle. The men clutched together. The turbulence, the silent rippling of the bushes and stunted trees. I can quote him almost word for word. He wants the frenzy of the rotor wash, the terrible urgency, but soundless, totally. They kill him. They remain true to themselves, Jeem. That’s it. It ends. He doesn’t want the helicopter gaining altitude to signal the end is here. He doesn’t want the figures to fade into the landscape. This is sentimental. It just ends. It ends up-close with the men in a circle, hair and clothes blowing, after they finish the killing.”I stayed in the living room for a while after she went to bed. I thought of Volterra in the mountains, hunched in his khaki field jacket, the deep pockets full of maps, the sky massing behind him. Sentimental. I didn’t believe a word she’d said. He wouldn’t follow it that far. He’d followed other things, gone the limit, abused people, made enemies, but this hovering was implausible to me, his camera clamped to the door frame. The aerial master, the filmed century. He wouldn’t let them kill a man, he wouldn’t film it if they did. We have to draw back at times, study our own involvement. The situation teaches that. Even in his drivenness he would see this, I believed.It was interesting how she’d made me defend him to myself (as Kathryn used to do, defend him). Not that Del had intended this. I didn’t know what she’d intended. The lie had a violence of its own, a cunning force she might have meant to direct against any or all of us, ironic, ornately motivated. How rich it was, a setting for any number of interpretations. I would have to reflect a long time before I could even begin to see what she had in mind, what complex human urging caused her to invent the story.The story, if I thought it was true, would only make me want to fix a drink, feeling obscurely pleased.When I passed the guest room I saw the door was ajar, the lamp still on, and I paused to look inside. In jeans and sleeveless shirt, her feet bare, she knelt on the floor. Her upper body was bent well forward, chest against knees. Her legs were together, buttocks resting on her heels. The arms pointed back along the floor, palms up. A compact gathering of curves. The curve of the head and upper body folded into the curve of the upper legs. The curve of the back and shoulders extended to her hands. The arms repeated the curve of the lower legs. Her head touched the floor. She remained that way for a considerable time. In the morning she told me the exercise was called Pose of a Child.

I joined David, running in the woods. Rains had turned the high grass solid green. We ran along paths on different levels of the hill, moving in and out of sight of each other. His bright clothes flashed through the spindly pines.Mrs. Helen was patient with my attempts to conjugate difficult verbs. She lectured on the niceties of pronunciation and stress, the correctness of this or that form in a given situation. We sat with our cups of tea, our embossed paper napkins. It seemed to me that the language as she taught it existed mainly as a medium of politeness between people, with odd allowances made for the communication of ideas and feelings. We ate English biscuits and talked about her family. Across the room the telex clattered numbers from Amman.I found myself scanning the English-language newspapers for stories of assault, suicide and murder. I did the same thing when I went on a ten-day trip, checking the local papers, wherever I happened to be, for items from the daily files of the police. I found myself trying to match the name of the victim with the name of the place where the crime was committed. Initials. The victim’s initials, the first letter of the word or words in the place-name. I don’t know why I did this. I wasn’t looking for the cult, I wasn’t even looking for murder victims especially. Any crime would do, any act that tended to isolate a person in a particular place, just so the letters matched.Again I stopped drinking, this time in Istanbul. In Athens I went running every day.

The Desert

11

in this vast space, which seems like nothing so much as a container for emptiness, we sit with our documents always ready, wondering if someone will appear and demand to know who we are, someone in authority, and to be unprepared is to risk serious things.The terminal at each end is full of categories of inspection to which we must submit, impelling us toward a sense of inwardness, a sense of smallness, a self-exposure we are never prepared for no matter how often we take this journey, the buried journey through categories and definitions and foreign languages, not the other, the sunlit trip to the east which we thought we’d decided to make. The decision we’d unwittingly arrived at is the one that brings us through passport control, through the security check and customs, the one that presents to us the magnetic metal detector, the baggage x-ray machine, the currency declaration, the customs declaration, the cards for embarkation and disembarkation, the flight number, the seat number, the times of departure and arrival.It does no good to say, as I’ve done a hundred times, it’s just another plane trip, I’ve made a hundred. It’s just another terminal, another country, the same floating seats, the documents of admission, the proofs and identifications.Air travel reminds us who we are. It’s the means by which we recognize ourselves as modern. The process removes us from the world and sets us apart from each other. We wander in the ambient noise, checking one more time for the flight coupon, the boarding pass, the visa. The process convinces us that at any moment we may have to submit to the force that is implied in all this, the unknown authority behind it, behind the categories, the languages we don’t understand. This vast terminal has been erected to examine souls.It is not surprising, therefore, to see men with submachine guns, to see vultures squatting on the baggage vehicles set at the end of the tarmac in the airport in Bombay when one arrives after a night flight from Athens.All of this we choose to forget. We devise a counter-system of elaborate forgetfulness. We agree on this together. And out in the street we see how easy it is, once we’re immersed in the thick crowded paint of things, the bright clothes and massed brown faces. But the experience is no less deep because we’ve agreed to forget it.Late in the day I walked with Anand Dass in the streets near my hotel. He looked heavier, moving through the soft air in a Michigan State t-shirt and faded jeans. He kept taking my arm as we crossed streets and I wondered why this seemed so curiously apt. Could these drivers be worse than Greeks? I was woozy from lack of sleep, that was all, and it probably showed.”Seeing to details. Mainly interviewing people. My boss has already set things in motion.””So this is new territory,” he said.”South Asia and so on. This will be a regional headquarters, separate from Athens once we get it going.””But you’re not coming out permanently.””Do you need a listener? Someone to talk to about the life and travels of Owen Brademas?””This is precisely the fact.” Clutching my forearm and laughing. “The man inspires comment, you know.””How many times did you see him?””He stayed with us. Three days. And three letters since. I didn’t know I cared for the man. But I read his letters again and again. My wife was fascinated by him. The worst field director in my experience. This is Owen. He digs like an amateur.”Under a movie billboard we passed a group of North Americans in saffron robes and running shoes, their heads shaved. They stood by a sound truck handing out booklets. What could I say? They looked deeply surprised in their baldness and blotched skin, amazed to be who they were, to be real and here. The loudspeaker carried flute music and chanting voices through the noise and fumes of the yellow-top taxis.”What are you teaching?””I am teaching the Greeks. I am looking at Hellenistic and Roman influences on Indian sculpture. Not a large subject but interesting. Figures of Buddha. I am getting very interested in figures of Buddha. I want to go to Kabul to see the Buddha of the Great Miracle.””You don’t want to go to Kabul, Anand.””It’s a transitional Buddha.””You know who you sound like.””Owen is in Lahore now. I sound just like him, don’t I? Do you go there at all?””I go everywhere twice. Once to get the wrong impression, once to strengthen it.””Do you want to see him? I’ll give you an address.””No. It will only depress me.””Let me give you an address. He went to Lahore to learn Kharoshthi script.”I tried to think of something funny to say. Anand laughed and grabbed my arm and we hurried across the street toward the Gateway of India, where people were gathering as night fell, street musicians, beggars, vendors of fruit drinks and sweets.”Do you have plans then?””I find I’m ready to go almost anywhere and just as ready to stay where I am.””This is a strange profession. Risk analysis. Your local man will be kept very busy. Believe it.””I like the idea of someone saying to me, West Africa.‘ Not that I’d necessarily accept. But I like the immensity of it. The immensity of landscape, of possibility. It’s bizarre, how opened up my life has become. ‘Think about it,‘ they’ll say. But there’s nothing to think about. That’s what’s odd.”We walked through one of the archways and stood above the sea steps. A small girl followed with a baby in her arms. The crowd slowly grew.”You should spend more time in India.””No. Four days. That’s enough.””Tomorrow you’ll come to dinner. Rajiv will want to hear about Tap. He received a letter, you know. Written in Ob.”The soft air made me sad.”And we’ll talk, you and I, about Owen.”Soft and moist, a hanging heat. People still came, talking, looking out to sea. They stood around the horn player, the man with the hand drums. There were sellers of invisible commodities, names whispered in the dark. Children kept appearing from the edges, silently crossing some margin or dividing line, cradling the shriveled infants. People drifted toward the Gateway from the street along the sea wall, from the inner streets, the edges, to stand in the warm night together and wait for a breeze. The sound of bicycle bells stuck briefly to the air.Everything clings.

She came at me with the potato peeler, wearing my L.L. Bean chamois cloth shirt, forest green, with long tuck-in tails. I stood there half embarrassed. It was in her face, absolutely, that she would kill me. A rage that will astonish me forever. I evaded the lunge, then stood thoughtfully against the cabinet, my hands tucked into my pants, thumbs showing, like a quarterback on a cold day, waiting to rehuddle.

Ann and Lindsay came down the steps of the British Council, carrying sacks of apples and books. I hailed them from a parkside table in the square. We ordered coffee and watched stooped-over people call their destinations into the windows of passing cabs.Lindsay carried fiction, Ann biography. I lifted an apple from one of the bags and took a lusty bite. It made them smile and I wondered if they interpreted the act as I’d instinctively meant it, meant it in a totally unformed way. To be back again among familiar things and people, alive to the levels of friendship a man enjoys with married women of a certain kind, the wives he is half in love with. Somewhere in the theft and biting of an apple there are elements of innocent erotic wishfulness and other things hard to name.”There’s a new wall slogan I’ve been seeing,” Lindsay said. “With a date attached?””Greece is risen,” Ann said. “And the date is the date the colonels took power. Sometime in sixty-seven.””Four twenty-one. Or twenty-one four, as they do it here.””Then there’s the other side of the argument. Was it three weeks ago? Someone killed the head of the riot police.””I must have missed that,” I said.”They killed his driver too. Another date. Charles said the assassins left a calling card. November seventeen. Students against the dictatorship. That was seventy-three, I think.””David’s in Turkey again.”This distracted remark, a remark that seemed to drift away from us, so softly spoken and bare, a remark that Lindsay made as an automatic response to talk of violence, prompted us to change the subject. I told them about a letter I’d received from Tap. He liked the sound the water made in the shower when it hit the plastic lining of the shower curtain. That was the letter.Lindsay said David’s kids sent videotapes. She also said she had a class to teach and hurried off after the first cup of coffee.We knew what we wanted to discuss but waited a long moment, allowing Lindsay’s departure to become complete. A crouched man jogged alongside a taxi, answering the driver’s hand-twisting gesture with the name of some district to the north.”I saw him yesterday,” Ann said. “He called and we had a drink.””I knew he’d get in touch.””He’s been away. Tried to call me apparently. He was in London.””See? Business. That’s all.””Yes. They’re moving there. The whole region apparently.””I thought it might be that.””So I suppose that will be the end of that. A relief actually. Doubly so.””Also a reversal.””Yes, I’m the one who’s supposed to be dragged off to yet another distant posting. Torn from the arms of love. I’m almost overwhelmed by relief. Go to London, go to Sydney. What a surprise it is, to feel this way. Why is it I have to discover these things as I go along? As events wheel about me like buzzards? Why don’t I know, in advance, just once, how I’ll feel about a certain thing? I hate surprises. I’m too old. I want to wear a housecoat for the rest of my life.””It’ll take more than that.””Shut up.””You’ll need to thicken your ankles and wear slippers without backs or sides. You’ll need to be blowzy. Thirty pounds heavier. A little bloated, a little unkempt.””My inner nature,” she said. “Wearing flip-flops. It’s perfect.””Standing around ruddy-faced, all your weight on one leg, your hip jutting out.””Don’t look at my hands. I have old fingers.””It was all conversation. That’s all. He’s a decent man. His flaws are part of a moral seriousness. Even when he was being completely unreasonable, I had to admire him for it and like him for it. Maybe he had some private suspicions he wanted cleared up. That’s all. Talk. His true mission in life.””Did you tell Charles about us?””Yes.””I thought you might have.””It wasn’t an easy position I was in. It never has been. I wanted to shock him a little. Make it real to him, dispel the fog he was disappearing into. I didn’t like knowing something he didn’t know about his own wife.””Anyway, that’s that.””We need Lindsay to help us understand all this. She wouldn’t have to comment. Only sit and gaze.””Already I begin to see what an odd match we were.””Happens all the time.”” ‘What do they see in each other?’ “”But isn’t there something rich and living in all these entanglements, the way we’ve mingled our lives, all of us, chaotically or not?””Thank God for books,” she said.Biography. It was time I was getting to the office. We said goodbye at the corner, taking each other’s hands in the way people do who want to press gladness into the flesh at the end of an uncertain time. Then I crossed the street and headed west.Silent. The rotor wash. The rippling trees. Dust spinning around them. Their hair and clothes blowing. The frenzy.

The room with its stone hearth, marble font, its ferns and fan palms and village rugs was devised by Lindsay to make her husband feel he had put behind him, at least for a time, all airports and travel. At regular intervals she apologized for the size of the place. The marble balustrade on the terrace, the glass wall producing a sunset, the ship painting from Hydra still unhung in a corner. Too large, she’d say, letting her hands swing out. Too long, too tall, too grand. Not one of life’s pressing dilemmas, we reply. But we have to remember that queasiness of this kind has always been a form of middle-class grace, especially when it arises from a feeling of privilege that is binding, privilege that does not allow easy denial, and Lindsay had arrived here, the new young wife, some weeks after David found the apartment. The place made her uneasy. It made her feel, among other things, that whatever risks David ran in places like Lebanon and Turkey were connected to the size of this room.He was playing his collection of Pacific Jazz records, a nice relic of the fifties with their original cover paintings, the odd cello and flute. Roy Hardeman showed up, here for two days of meetings and wearing new glasses, oversized and squarish. We decided we’d have one more drink and go to dinner. An early night, Lindsay said. We needed an early night.Hardeman’s attitude, as uninvited guest, was one of temporary deference, a studious waiting for the host, the hostess, the good friend to approach some topic that might give him a chance to reason and speak competitively. He didn’t have to wait long.David said, “I keep reading about tribes or hordes or peoples who came sweeping out of Central Asia. What is it about Central Asia that makes us want to say that people came sweeping out of it?””I don’t know,” I said.”Why don’t we say the Macedonians came sweeping out of Europe? They did. Alexander in particular. But we don’t say that. Or the Romans or the Crusaders.””Do you think it’s a racist term?” Hardeman said.”White people established empires. Dark people came sweeping out of Central Asia.””What about the Aryans?” Hardeman said. “We don’t say the Aryans came sweeping out of Central Asia. They filtered down, they migrated or they simply arrived.””Exactly. This is because the Aryans were light-skinned. Light-skinned people filter down. Dark people come sweeping out. The Turks came sweeping out. The Mongols. The Bactrians. They came in waves. Wave after wave.””All right. But your original premise is that Central Asia is a place out of which people come sweeping. Now is it only dark people who come sweeping out of Central Asia or is it simply that Central Asia is a place out of which people of any color might come sweeping, with the exception of the Aryans? Are we talking about race, language or geography?””I think there’s something about Central Asia that makes us want to say that people came sweeping out of it but there is also the fact that these people tend to be dark-skinned. You can’t separate the two things.””We’ve separated the Aryans,” Hardeman said. “And what about the Huns? Certainly the Huns came sweeping out of Central Asia.””What color were the Huns?” David said.”They weren’t light, they weren’t dark.””I should have had this conversation with someone else.””Sorry.””I felt I’d perceived something important and interesting, all on my own, you son of a bitch.””Well you probably did. I’m not sure of my facts really.””Yes you are.””Actually I am.””Of course you are.””But it’s an interesting premise,” Hardeman said.”Fuck you.”We went to dinner in an old mansion near the U.S. embassy. Hardeman was inhaling short Scotches. The perfect part in his hair, the geometric glasses and three-piece suit seemed the achievements of a systematic self-knowledge. This was the finished thing. He was physically compact, worked neatly into well-cut clothes, and nothing attached to him that had not been the subject of meticulous inner testing.”Karen was saying—listen to this, Lindsay—that you both have to come and stay with us in London, soon as we’re settled.””Good. In the spring.””In the fall would be better. We have to find a nanny.””But you don’t have children,” she said.”My original kids.””I didn’t know you had original kids.””My first marriage.””I didn’t know,” she said.”They’ll spend the summer. Karen’s looking forward to finding a nanny.”David sat quietly, surrounding a beer, still unhappy over the earlier conversation.”I saw Andreas not too long ago,” I said. “We had a dinner of brains and lower organs.””A good man,” Hardeman said. “Bright, analytical.””What does he do for the firm?””Sales rep. A hard worker. They love him in Bremen. Speaks German well. They tried very hard to talk him into staying.”I let a silence fall over this last remark. We ordered beer all around. When the food came we examined each other’s dishes. After some discussion Lindsay and I traded plates.”Have they told you,” Hardeman said, “how Karen used to spend her evenings?”I said I wasn’t sure. Karen used to spend her evenings sitting on a stool near the right-field line in Fulton County Stadium, Atlanta, Georgia, running down foul balls hit that way by National League stalwarts. She was sixteen years old, a golden girl on grassy turf, hair reaching her waist. He met her six years later in a revolving restaurant.”I thought it was the left-field line,” David said.”Right-field.””She told me left.””Couldn’t have been left. It was left-handed hitters she feared most. Who was active then? You’re the expert. Give us some names.”David went back to his curry. When we finished the beer, Hardeman ordered another scotch. And when he asked where the men’s room was, I said I was heading that way myself.The only water was cold. We stood with our backs to each other. I held my hands under the tap, talking over my shoulder to Hardeman, who was at the urinal.”Did I understand you to say that Andreas is leaving the firm?””Correct.””I thought I understood he was moving on to London with other key people in the region.””Not so.””He wants to stay in Athens then.””I don’t know what he wants.””Is he looking for a job, do you know? Has he said anything to you at all?””Why would he? We don’t interact at that level. I’m in manufacturing.””I’d be interested in finding out what his plans are. It would only take a phone call.””Make it,” he said.”I wonder if you’d do it for me. Not to Andreas. Someone in the sales department or personnel.”He was finished at the urinal and slowly wheeled in my direction. I turned my head toward the blank wall in front of me.”Why should I?” he said.”I’d like to know why he left, who he plans to work for. If he doesn’t have plans for a new job, I’d be interested in knowing why. I’d also like to know if he intends to remain in Athens.” I paused, letting the water run over my hands. “It could be important.””Who do you work for?” Hardeman said.”I’m sure David’s told you.””Does he know?”“Of course he knows. Look, I can’t go into details. I’ll only say Andreas may have a sideline. He may be connected to something besides air cooling systems in Bremen.””Andreas was a valuable member of the firm. Why should I involve myself in an unauthorized read-out? We work for the same people. And if he’s chosen to leave, he may also choose to return someday.””What do you know about him that may not be in his personnel file? Anything at all. One thing.””It’s not his identity I have doubts about.””Very funny.””I don’t mean it to be. Sure, David’s mentioned political risk insurance. He’s also mentioned the scrambled telexes he occasionally sends your way, unscrambled, which I told him I thought was unconscionable, regardless of content, regardless of friendship. I may not know anything about Andreas’ private life or his politics but I know the firm he’s worked for these last three or four years. What do I know about you?”What could I say, we were fellow Americans? I felt foolish, staring at the wall, my hands turning in the stream of water. My attempt to learn something was less useful than the dumbest amateur’s because this is what an amateur enjoys, a men’s room meeting with clipped dialogue. I wasn’t even good at clipped dialogue.He was waiting to wash his hands.The news that Andreas was not going to London would lurk vaguely in my mind in the days to come like the knowledge of some unpleasantness whose exact nature will not surface when one tries to recall it. Maybe London was his clumsy way of ending the affair with Ann, inventing a distance between them. Maybe the story revolved around her. It was all part of the same thing, that rapt entanglement I’d spoken to her about a couple of days earlier (only to be made fun of). The world is here, the world is where I want to be.”We promised ourselves an early night,” Lindsay said.Hardeman ordered another drink. He described the house he was renting in Mayfair. He spoke slowly but very clearly and his sentences began to extend into an elaborate and self-conscious correctness, a latticework of clauses, pure grammar. Drunk.He and I shared the back seat in David’s car. We hadn’t gone two blocks when he dropped off to sleep. It was like the death of a machine-tooled part. At a red light David looked at me in the rearview mirror.”I have an idea. Are you ready for this? Because it’s one of the great ideas of my career. Maybe the greatest. I started thinking about it during dinner when I saw how much he was drinking. It came to me then. And it’s developing, refining itself even as we sit here waiting for the light to change. I think we can bring it off, boy, if we’re cunning enough, if we really want to do it.””We’re cunning enough,” Lindsay said, “but we don’t want to do it.”The idea was to put Hardeman on a plane to some distant city. There was a flight at 3:50 a.m. to Tehran, for instance, on KLM. He wouldn’t need a visa to get on the plane. He would only need a visa to get out of the terminal once he was there. This was beyond our purview, David said. All we wanted to do was send him somewhere. We’d need his passport, which David was certain he’d be carrying, and a ticket, which David would purchase with one of his credit cards.We passed my building. A moment or two later we passed their building. Lindsay stared into the window on her side.”Once we have the ticket,” David said, “we come back out to the car and get him on his feet and walk him between us into the terminal. We get him a seat in the nonsmoking area, which I’m sure he’ll appreciate upon reflection, and then we face our biggest problem, which is how to get him through passport control.”Lindsay began to laugh, a little warily.”By this time he is probably semiconscious. He can walk but can’t think. If we stick the boarding pass, ticket and passport in his fist, it’s possible he can make it past the booth through habit alone. But what happens then? We can’t follow him through passport control. It’s too much to expect that he’ll look at the boarding pass and walk automatically to the right gate.”I told him there was a simple solution. We were on the airport road, doing a hundred kilometers, and he looked at me in the mirror, briefly, to make sure I was serious.”Breathtakingly simple,” I said. “All we have to do is buy two tickets. One of us takes him through the entire process, right to his seat on the plane.”Lindsay thought this was very funny. It could work after all. There was a huskiness in her laugh, the slightly surprised dawning of the idea that she was mean enough to want it to work.”Then the one who accompanies him simply turns around and goes down the ramp and gets back on the shuttle bus, feigning illness. They’ll cancel the ticket. It won’t cost a dime.”David whispered, “Of course, of course.”I felt all along we wouldn’t do it. It was too grand, too powerful. And as many times as I’d traveled with a visa, I didn’t know whether he was right about that. I thought they examined visas at the airline counter before issuing boarding passes. But David kept on driving, kept on talking, and Lindsay began to sag in her seat as if to hide from the enormity of it all. Tehran. They would think he’d come to hold a service for the hostages.In the end we couldn’t even get him out of the car. He kept hitting his head, falling away from us, limbs floppy. It was interesting to see the concentration in David’s face. He viewed the formless Hardeman as a problem in surfaces, how and where to grip. He tugged at him, he wrestled. The door-opening was small and oddly shaped and David’s considerable bulk was a problem in itself. He tried kneeling on the front seat and scooping Hardeman out to me. He tried a number of things. He was completely involved in the idea, the vision. He wanted to send this man to another place.

The figure appeared in a blizzard, moving toward the house from the other side of the park, a skier in bright banded colors coming in diagonal stride, the only clear shape in that dead-even light, a world without shadow, a winter’s worth of snow on the streets and cars and laid over the park benches and the bird bath in the yard, the skier digging in, working across that dreamlike space, red-hooded, masked.You can’t walk down Bay Street and pick out the Americans from the Canadians. They are alien beings in our midst, waiting for a signal. This is the science-fiction theme (SF for semi-facetious). They’re in the schools, teaching our children, subtly and even unintentionally promoting their own values— values they assume we share. The theme of the corruption of the innocent. Their crime families have footholds in our cities —drugs, pornography, legitimate businesses—and their pimps from Buffalo and Detroit work both sides of the border, keeping the girls in motion. The theme of expansionism, of organized criminal infiltration. They own the corporations, the processing plants, the mineral rights, a huge share of the Canadian earth. The colonialist theme, the theme of exploitation, of greatest possible utilization. They are right next to us, sending their contaminants, their pollutants, their noxious industrial waste into our rivers, lakes and air. The theme of power’s ignorance and blindness and contempt. We are in the path of their television programs, their movies and music, the whole enormous rot and glut and blare of their culture. The theme of cancer and its spread.I stood in the window as she removed the skis and carried them up the steps. The sight of her cutting through that blown snow, appearing out of the invisible city around us, the craft and mystery of it filled me with deep delight.

George Rowser stepped out of the elevator at the Hilton in Lahore, looking pale and rumpled. He put his briefcase down, setting it between his feet, then used both hands to adjust his glasses, raising the hands toward his face, fingers extended, palms turned toward each other, in a gesture that started out as a blessing of multitudes. When he saw me in a lobby chair he walked toward the coffee shop, pigeon-toed. We ordered Kipling burgers and fresh fruit juice. Gatherings of more than six people were forbidden.”Why am I here, George?””Where were you?””Islamabad.””So I wanted to talk. It’s not as though you were on the other side of the world.””Couldn’t we talk on the phone?””Be smart,” he said. “In addition to which, this city has architecture. Go look at the public buildings. What would you call this architecture? Gothic, Victorian—what else, Punjabi? Why do I have the impression you know things like this?””Maybe it’s Moghul. Or Moghul-influenced. I don’t know really.””Whatever, it’s a nice blend. A very happy blend. Who were the Moghuls?””They came sweeping out of Central Asia.”Four or five ballpoint pens stuck out of the breast pocket of his suit coat. His briefcase was under the table, upright, wedged between his calves. I waited for him to tell me what he wanted to talk about.”I’m getting a remote ignition device put in my car. They stick a thing on the trunk. I can start the car while I’m in the kitchen boiling an egg.” He looked out into the lobby. “If it blows up, the egg tastes that much better.””Nice. What about tear gas ducts?””I do defensive measures only. Are you kidding? The parent would be upset if they found out I was loading a vehicle with incapacitators. Not that it matters anymore.””What do you mean?””I’m seriously thinking I may resign, Jim.”The fact that he used my name seemed almost as important as the statement that preceded it. Was he saying one thing or two?”Choice? Or are they forcing you out?””There are pressures,” he said. “Developments no one could have foreseen. Never mind details. I think it may be time, that’s all. I need a change. We all need a change now and then.””What kind of pressures? From the parent?”A little bored. “The parent is a collector. They acquire companies, they adjust, they seek a balance. We’re one of the companies, that’s all. They look at the profit curve. That’s all they know from.””What do they see when they look at this curve?””What they lose one year in insurance they gain in consumer products or manufacturing. They diversify to minimize risk. You and I work at risk but not in the same sense the parent knows the word. The parent knows the word in a limited sense.””What did Iran do to us?””Limited coverage. Plus reinsurance. But we got hurt like everybody else. Who could predict? I don’t know anyone who predicted. A haunting failure. They’re still straggling onto the beach in Greece. Like the Lebanon thing earlier. We picked the right place for our headquarters. That’s one thing we did.”Hamburgers for dinner. This was Rowserlike. Skip lunch, bolt dinner, go to bed, remembering to secure all systems.”What’s happening in your life, George, outside the Northeast Group?””I have to wear white socks. My doctor says I’m allergic to dye.””Tension. You ought to change your wardrobe completely. You look like an assistant principal of the 1950s in a high school on the wrong side of town. Get one of those knee-length shirts the men wear here. And some loose trousers.””They’re throwing away their London suits to wear traditional things. You know what that means, don’t you?””Our lives are in danger.””How’s your burger?” he said.He suggested we get a car and driver and take a ride before dark. There was a mausoleum he wanted to see. I watched him go to the desk to make arrangements. He walked in a block of heavy air, a personal zone in which movement was difficult, breathing slightly labored. Every space he inhabited seemed enclosed. There was a basic containment or frustration. His compulsive secrecy, the taking of endless precautions would explain some of this, of course. Then there were his numbers, the data he collected and sorted and studied endlessly. This took up the rest of his space.The Mall in Lahore is a broad avenue running roughly east and west, built by, named by the British. Vehicles rush into it with the cartoonish verve of objects possessing human traits, so individualistic, so seemingly intent on playing merry hell with the boulevard’s stately pretensions. Cycle rickshaws, horse-drawn taxis, minicabs painted pink, fuchsia, peacock blue, trucks and cars and scooters, bicycles weaving in and out of bullock carts, vendors wheeling massive arrangements of nuts, fruits and vegetables, buses leaning under the rooftop weight of trussed-up bundles, furniture and other objects.What we see, Owen Brademas might say, is the grand ordering imperial vision as it is overrun by the surge and pelt of daily life.Then there was the guard at the entrance to the local office of the Mainland Bank. An elderly turbaned fellow with enormous drooping mustache, a tunic and pajama pants, a curved dagger in his sash and a pair of pointed slippers. A relative of the doorman at the Hilton. The outfit seemed intended to register in people’s minds the hopeful truth that colonialism was a tourist ornament now, utterly safe to display in public. The foreign bank he guarded was a co-survivor of the picturesque past, exerting no more influence than the man himself. The man had a single task, David told me once. To lower the steel shutters at the first sign of a demonstration.We passed some of the buildings Rowser had referred to, the high court, the museum, and headed north.”Tanker loadings at Kharg are down to two a week.””Maintenance.””The fields are looking pretty grim. Only five rigs in action, I hear from Abadan.””Parts,” I said.”Plus which the telex and telephone are down between Abadan and Tehran.””But you still hear.””I hear a little.””The bankers call it a black hole. Iran.””Have you seen the mosques? Isfahan is the place to go. I mean gorgeous. You have to spend time in the courtyards. Spend time, relax, check the tilework. I’d give anything to get up close to one of those domes. There’s a dome in Isfahan”—he shaped it with his hands.We were stopped by traffic on the road around the old city. A man came through the fortified gate and stood at the car window looking in at us, a man with a bamboo stick, wearing a rag wrapped around his head, a military jacket with copper medals, a dozen bead necklaces, a filthy white robe, oversized army boots without laces, beads around his ankles and wrists. He had hair dyed red and carried live chickens. Rowser asked the driver what he wanted. Hundreds of people congregated near the gate. I tried to look past them into the old city. The driver said he didn’t know.”I think I’m in New York,” Rowser said.”That reminds me. I want to ask you about taking three or four weeks in early summer. I want to spend time with my son in North America.””I don’t have any problem with that.”Rowser never said yes. He said, “I don’t have any problem with that.” Or, “I don’t see how it could hurt.””Will you still be with the firm?””No,” he said.”It’s imminent then.””I don’t see any reason to hang around the halls. When the time comes, you have to have the grace to disappear.” We were moving again. “Did you ever remarry?” he said. “I never got divorced. I’m only separated, George.” “That’s a crazy way to live. Separated. Divorce teaches us things. You never learn anything being separated.” “I don’t want to learn anything. Leave me alone.” “I’m only saying do one thing or do the other.” “I don’t want a divorce. It’s boring, it’s trite.” “In these matters it’s best to terminate officially. That way you forget. File the papers in your steel cabinet.”We crossed a river and pulled up in front of a tall gateway, locked for the night. Rowser spoke to the driver, who went to look for the watchman, returning in ten minutes with a man chewing betel leaf. We entered a vast garden with fountains and paved watercourses. At the far end was the tomb of Jehangir, a low red sandstone structure with a minaret at each corner. The minarets were octagonal, coming to full height in white marble cupolas. Rowser said something to our driver, who spoke to the watchman. The watchman took a socket wrench out of his back pocket and inserted it in an opening in the pavement, turning full circle. The fountains began to play.We walked slowly toward the central chamber, hearing the sunset call to prayer from somewhere beyond the walls. A breeze blew Rowser’s tie over his shoulder.”We all need a change now and then. This is basic to anyone’s sense of perspective. The type person I am, which is to say a plodder, go it slow, work the angles, worry it, piss blood over it, even this type person has to start over now and then. But maybe this type less than others. I personally hired you, Jim. This makes me responsible to a degree. I’m your sole contact with the parent. You’ll have a new man in the region. He’ll be hired directly by the parent or sent over from one of their other interests, other arms. It could be an uncomfortable arrangement. We’re identified with each other, you and I, in people’s minds. That’s all I’m saying. Give it some thought.”We stood on a platform at the main arched opening, which jutted from a series of eight other archways. The exterior walls were inset with designs in white marble.”I’m told there are better examples,” Rowser said, “but this is a basic Moghul tomb, except it doesn’t have a dome.”He gestured with his free hand, indicating a dome. We went inside and stood a moment, waiting for the watchman to turn on a light. The sarcophagus stood under a vaulted ceiling. I circled it slowly, running my hand over the surface. Rowser set the briefcase between his feet.”Take my advice,” he said. “Resign, find a job somewhere in the States, invest in real estate, start a retirement plan, get a divorce.”The white marble surface was inlaid with semiprecious stones in seamless floral designs and in chaste calligraphy, shaped stones, jeweled stones, delicate and free-figured. The surface ran cool and smooth. Traceries of black Koranic letters covered the longer sides of the tomb with a smaller grouping on top. My hand moved slowly over the words, feeling for breaks between the inlay and marble, not to fault the craftsmen, of course, but only to find the human labor, the individual, in the wholeness and beauty of the tomb.It wasn’t until we were walking back through the garden that I asked our driver what the words represented. They were the ninety-nine names of God.