Her grandmother had been very beautiful, but her eyes carried the haunted look Rebecca had seen in her sister. In one photograph, she descended the steps of a small airplane. A man behind with black spectacles carried two suitcases. It was the only photograph Rebecca took from the box. A year later, she wrote away to Air France. It was the closest she could get to her grandparents" early life without money or education.
She wondered who would discover her s...o...b..x. In the village of Linieres-Bouton, the only glamorous men were the ones who sometimes appeared in summer from Paris on vacation with their wives and children-or visiting elderly relatives who otherwise annoyed them.
Rebecca dwelled on how everything had changed for her grandfather after her grandmother drowned and left him with a single daughter to raise that was her mother.
Did he consider the second half of his life a failure? He was unable to travel because of the burden of child care, and so worked with local businesses, rather than the bigger sales contracts in Paris, Tours, and Nantes that he"d been so successful with. He had also lost the woman he loved to a freak accident.
Rebecca felt it was too harsh to think about. Did he remember the moment that everything changed, like a subtle shift in light? Morning, and then a long afternoon of darkness.
She wondered how much of it was still with him. Was that man trapped inside the slow, sighing grandfather with unsteady hands?
Rebecca was too young to understand the conditions and the feelings that come with age. "The Quiet Story of a Sleeping Man" was the t.i.tle of a sketch Rebecca had made of her grandfather one afternoon. When she showed it to him, he nodded and patted her head gently. Then he went into the bathroom and closed the door. The hollow clank of his belt hit the floor. Then a long sigh. A newspaper rustling.
Later that afternoon, during a game show on the television, he mentioned that Rebecca might like to hang her sketch in the hallway.
"Use nails from a jar in the shed," he said. "There are plenty, and they"re all the same."
Chapter Four.
Bands of wasteland skirt the city of Athens. Sometimes people wander there, looking for things of value to sell in the flea markets of Monastiraki. Bend down and brush away dry soil to reveal a single tile, laid two thousand years ago.
About four hundred years later as the Roman Empire crumbles-cheering as a baby takes his first steps across the very old tiled floor. Centuries on, stories of a new world fill the house, as honey spills from a jug and is lapped up by a hungry dog.
There were more trees then.
The air heavy with dry gra.s.s.
Birds came and went.
Now, just yellow rocks, a couch, and a mattress abandoned in the dead of night. Broken gla.s.s blinks in the sun. The only shade is from a low crumbling wall-pieces spat out like rotten teeth. The wall was once smooth. An architect fingered the seams then blew the dust from his hands. His horse was outside, drinking loudly from a deep bucket.
Athens is a world of despair and sudden beauty.
And it was from these two conflicting moods that Rebecca found her way as a woman.
It wasn"t long before she loved the city.
And the ability to love Athens, like all love, lies not in the city but in the visitor.
The city matched Rebecca at every turn. Her moods reflected in the things that took place around her-things that she noticed: a cigarette vendor giving bits of fish to cats, a sudden shower of rain, deformed children sitting calmly on the steps of churches as their mothers shook their fists at G.o.d and then opened them to pa.s.sing tourists.
Rebecca felt a physical part of the city, and sensing such blind devotion, it embraced her as its own.
When she opened her eyes, George was already awake. He turned and smiled at her, then offered another ma.s.sage.
"I must start drawing soon," she said. "But let"s have some coffee."
George offered to go out for fresh bread, but Rebecca said it would take too long.
He seemed dreamy and light. She even heard him laughing in the shower.
George stared at things in her kitchen, drinking his coffee slowly.
Rebecca held the front door open and wished him luck with his day. He waved again and stepped out backward. Then she took a long shower.
She spent the day making sketches and drinking chamomile tea. In the afternoon, she slipped from her clothes and worked in her underwear. When it became too hot, she turned the squeaking taps of the shower and waited a few moments before stepping in. There were cracks in the yellow wall, and water found and filled each one quickly-soaking the exposed cement that had dried in the darkness.
She slowly made everything cold.
Pellets of water broke the film of sweat on her body.
She let her mouth fill.
Rebecca"s grandmother had drowned one afternoon at the end of summer.
The lake wasn"t far from their house.
Rebecca"s mother had watched. She was only a child herself. She ran home and told her father. The back door swung open. His daughter couldn"t keep up and soon found herself all alone in the forest. She slowed to a walk. She was afraid. She started crying and then peed. Her legs stung. When she arrived at the lake, all she could see was a cool expanse of water. Then on the other side of the lake, perched on the gra.s.s-two bodies, one moving frantically-the other very still.
It was 1964. Rebecca"s mother was almost six years old.
A policeman sat with them at the kitchen table. He kept touching his belt. They drank tea.
His hat was on the table next to a currant cake.
"What will you do with her clothes?" the young gendarme asked. The clock in the hall ticked loudly as if trying to answer.
Then the policeman nodded at the little girl on the couch with her doll. "What are you going to do with her?"
Her father looked at his empty cup without saying anything. He hardly said anything ever again.
The policeman finished his tea and went home.
Rebecca"s hair was wet and heavy from the shower. Evening was falling over Athens.
Her drawings came to life in the dusk.
The city was cooling and traffic had thinned along the main avenue. Her neighbors. .h.i.t spoons against pots. Someone was setting out plates. Children called in by a voice on the verge of anger.
She thought of George and their single night together.
She tried to imagine what he was thinking. The love of a man is like a drop of color into something clear.
When Rebecca worked for Air France, an old man once died in his seat.
Most of the other pa.s.sengers were asleep. She noticed him because his eyes were open. She flipped through his pa.s.sport. He wasn"t married. His shoes were nice. He also had a mole on his face. His watch was heavy and light gold. Its hands shone in the dark. There were people on the ground who thought he was alive.
Rebecca lived mostly in hotels. Sometimes she would lie in bed and look at her uniform laid out on the chair.
That"s me, she would think.
That"s who I am.
Chapter Five.
George"s father ran away when George was about seven.
George had inherited his large jaw, which gave him the appearance of being more athletic than he was. Deep-set green eyes lingered in places where other eyes pa.s.sed without feeling.
In the paradise of daydreams, George liked to think he was a reincarnation of Johann Sebastian Bach, who, like George, was famously unappreciated in his own lifetime, especially by his family.
George liked to stay up all night in the cafes of fashionable Kolonaki and read international newspapers. He sipped grainy Greek coffee and ate sticky baklava with a knife and fork. When no one was looking, he poured liquor into his coffee.
His chronic drinking began when he was fourteen, and inspired long walks through Portsmouth, New Hampshire, where he attended boarding school. It was a stark, gray town, with lingering fog at the windows of houses on the dock, the tall white nose of a town church illuminated against a white froth of sky.
Drinking gave George a sense of quiet happiness. It was something to look forward to. It allowed him to focus on the moment and think wild things he never would have thought while sober. When he was drunk, the past was a smoking ruin far away-something he could shrug off.
George attended the famous Exmouth Academy. The floors were always shiny. There were many other boys like him. They got along quite well. Anything edible sent from home was shared. They also loaned each other cushions and phone cards and had long group discussions after lights-out.
On Sunday, whole lines of boys could be seen trudging up the hill to church from the grounds of the school, like specters in their black capes. In summer they wore white b.u.t.ton-down shirts, striped orange ties, brown blazers with white piping, brown shorts with brown socks. Chestnut oxford shoes were suggested but not required.
In the evening, they were free to watch television in the common area and eat a limited amount of candy.
Every Sunday, each boy had to write home. Here is a letter that George wrote home to his mother: As George aged, his enthusiasm for the rigorous life at school began to wane. The other boys became mechanized versions of themselves. One boy jumped off the roof. The headmaster said he died on the way to hospital.
Unlike many of the boys whose teenage years drained them of the sweetness upon which they"d shared early happiness, George simply failed to harden to the idea that life is disappointing because: i. People are motivated by vanity ii. Life is over before you get to understand anything and so is probably meaningless Instead, George became messy, emotional, careless, and weepy. His teachers in the upper school always seemed tired when they looked at him, and on several occasions they made sure the house staff confiscated his liquor without actually writing it up formally. When he threw up, younger boys could smell it in the hallway, and talked about it loudly at breakfast. Eventually one of the groundskeepers told George not to eat before or during his drinking sessions-at least as a way to control the odor.
Another way George escaped the circ.u.mstances of his loneliness was through music. He especially loved J. S. Bach. It was formal tenderness-love confined to structure. George played his music nonstop. There was so much to hear and he was never disappointed. George often bragged that Bach wrote so much in his own lifetime that if someone were employed full-time to copy out his entire library of work, it would take sixty-three years of labor just to copy the music from one page to another.
Bach also raised children. That was another reason George liked him. Unlike George"s own father, Johann Sebastian Bach didn"t run away from his son-even if he could only afford to give him two meals a day and a bed made of straw.
And then at fifteen, while other boys were swapping pictures of girls ripped from photography books in the library, or smoking in the orchard, George developed an obsessive love for language and cla.s.sical history. His teachers" faith in him was renewed, and their sudden avuncular affection somehow cemented his natural sweetness for good.
By his sixteenth birthday (which his mother forgot) George spent Sundays translating whole chapters of Latin into modern English. He also loved the old Greek stories of myths and G.o.ds. He liked to imagine all the characters dancing together on stage to some eighteenth-century organ piece by Bach. He even tried to make a small theater from cardboard, but abandoned the project when he glued his fingers together and had to spend a day with the school matron, who was once in the army and didn"t like cla.s.sical music.
George was attracted to the Greek G.o.ds because no one believed in them anymore.
When Matron asked what he liked to do for fun, he went on about language. He told her that language owes its existence and ident.i.ty to what it can never be, only to what it can point at. For the sound of language is the very embodiment of desire. And despite its greatest efforts, language is destined only to fail. Matron nodded and asked if he had been drinking.
"I won"t lie to you, Matron," he said. "I have been."
She shook her head in reproach. "Well, don"t let the masters catch you or I"ll be bandaging more than your hands."
George loved every aspect of language. He loved to see it written, to hear it used, to feel its sounds in his mouth. What couldn"t be felt in real life could be felt through language-through the experience of another by the setting of marks upon a page. It was unthinkable, yet it worked.
"We have found a way to record . . ."
George had once begun one of his term papers.
" . . . And for the past 5,000 years there has been a thread running through humanity keeping it together, so that we may know a person"s innermost feelings without ever having known them personally . . ."
Considering himself something of an expert, George liked to a.n.a.lyze the few letters his mother had written to him at the academy. They required careful examination, for in them (George had convinced himself) there was veiled love.
George"s parents were like a jigsaw puzzle that came without the parts he wanted most.
George sometimes took the afternoon off school. There was a churchyard overlooking the sea that he liked to sit in. His boarding school was set high on the edge of town, with fields that sloped to an apple orchard. Beyond the far wall of the orchard, where the older boys met local girls and lied to them, lay the churchyard and then the town of Portsmouth. Beyond that, unknown valleys and fields.
George loved sprinting through the orchard toward the far wall. In early autumn, sunlight fell golden through the trees. Once across the wall and through the field, he came upon the churchyard.
Even when George could see his own breath, the bright sun warmed the tops of graves, as if anointing each silent dweller. The flat graves were the oldest. Children"s headstones made the best seats. George liked to sit on them and smoke cigarettes. Sometimes he would chat to the child, and say things like, "Well, if you came to my school, you should take Miss Corday for French . . ."
The longer George sat on each headstone, the closer he felt to the child beneath him. His "best" friend in the churchyard had died in 1782. His gravestone read: 17781782
HERE LIES OUR SON,.
TOM COPTHORNE.
WHO DIED AGED FOUR YEARS,.