“Then let’s wave.”
They turned and climbed up the next slopes until they could see the boat again. They waved, but no one saw them. Forgotten already, Sam thought with amusement and with a certain amount of satisfaction. They shouted and the abrupt echoes came back to them. They wondered what to do next; beyond their vantage point lay ravines and coves, desert scrub shining under dark blue light. It was so still and undisturbed that it provoked in them a childish desire to ruffle it up and make it less pure. Without even talking about it they walked on, plunging down toward the sea a second time, singing as they went, threading their way carefully through prickly pears to the words of “Paperback Writer.”
What beautiful animals we are, Sam thought, beautiful as panthers. When they reached the white rocks along the water she saw two red spots as she stepped past them. Blood, she thought at once. She stopped and kneeled to look closer, and there was a sudden bafflement in her face. She had been right. They were two dried spots of blood, like small things that have been casually mislaid. She felt a quick thrill whose root was hidden to her.
“It can’t be,” Naomi said.
“They have animals here?” Sam wondered aloud.
“No one hunts in these parts.”
Something in Sam stiffened and her instincts kicked in. She touched one of the spots. “Just two spots? No, it’s a drip. From a height.”
“I guess so,” Naomi said.
“It must be from a person. Hikers, maybe?”
People did come here on private boats, like themselves. But Naomi was skeptical.
“We didn’t see any boats leaving before us.”
“Then they must’ve walked over the mountain.”
“No.”
They rose and looked around but saw nothing. A mood of doubt went through them, but they said nothing to each other. They merely kept walking, scaling the next rise until they were peering down at slopes thick with glistening thistles. There was a curve of rock and sheltered water beneath it, waves foaming a few feet out on the hidden stone. At first, nothing to see. But here, in the full sunlight, a figure lay stretched out in the thyme bushes, a man asleep on his side in a pile of rags with a plastic bottle on the ground beside him.
The man was half naked, in tracksuit pants, with thong sandals. A tattered sweater was laid out on the cactus a few feet away as if drying. He looked young to them, long-haired, the beard grown out and ungroomed. An exhausted hobo of the sea. Naomi could tell that he was not Greek. It was something about the clothes, the totality of his exhaustion. But Sam was thinking differently. She looked farther down the coast and saw nothing. Not even the flimsiest dinghy or a discarded paddle. She was an avid news reader, being the daughter of a journalist, and something had already occurred to her, and though she might have come to the same conclusion as Naomi she was less moralistic about it. They couldn’t now pretend that they hadn’t seen him, and they couldn’t walk back to the yacht without making sense of it. She was curious for a moment, but she then wondered about the extreme concentration that seemed to have come into Naomi’s face.
Gradually, the English girl lost her alarm; it was Sam who held herself tense and wanted to go back immediately. But Naomi calmed her with hand gestures. There was nothing threatening about the sleeper. He was abject and abandoned, self-abandoned even. The two drops of blood were his. A cut hand, a cut foot: his misery had expressed itself. There was a way of telling that he had come from the sea, not from the port, and that he was not sleeping through a surfeit of leisure. Suddenly there was motion in the skies and they looked up. Two huge birds were circling overhead, turning slowly and looking down at the three humans as if there was something in their arrangement that needed to be deciphered. Slowly, they dropped closer. The man turned equally slowly onto his back and his mouth fell open. His naked torso was covered with long weals and scratches, and the skin had begun to darken. They moved back to the ledge from where they had started out, one step at a time, not a pebble displaced.
“He’s not dying,” Naomi said. “He’s just sleeping. He’s washed up from the sea.”
Sam wondered aloud if they should go back anyway and talk to him. It seemed cowardly to just return without doing anything, without making contact.
“Make contact?” Naomi smiled.
“I didn’t mean it weirdly. I meant—just go down and see who he is. He was bleeding.”
“Not today. Another time.”
Naomi signaled and they set off back the way they had come, but more hurriedly.
When they were close to their original landing, Naomi said, “We definitely shouldn’t say anything to your father. Nothing at all. Right?”
“Nothing.”
“I’m sure he’ll overreact. He’ll probably go to the police straightaway. He’ll think it’s the right thing to do.”
She had reached out and gently locked a hand around Sam’s wrists so that the younger girl was forced to look up into her metal-steady blue eyes. There was a quivering little threat inside the pupils.
“He’s an Arab, isn’t he?” Sam blurted out.
There was a long silence as they worked their way back into view of the yacht, which had not after all dislodged itself in order to find them, and when they scaled the first hill on their itinerary they waved, as before, and the crew, who might have been growing a little anxious at their long absence, made signals in response as if it were they who had gone missing for a while.
—
When they got back to the port, Naomi and Sam slipped away by themselves and went to a taverna inside the labyrinth of alleys. It was dusk. The first moment of cool in many hours and they gulped down a carafe of Moschofilero at a table on the street. Around the amphitheater of the port rose the terraced captains’ houses of centuries past while, increasingly audible, starlings babbled in the trees of the squares. Birds on the wire, Naomi always thought, in honor of the Cohen song. Sam’s hands were shaking; she seemed about to launch into an outburst. But about what? I haven’t asked her to do anything outrageous, Naomi thought. I haven’t made her do something illicit. She hasn’t been forced.
But Sam was not thinking that. She was, on the contrary, filled with an elated trepidation that was shy and quiet. She had the feeling that Naomi was thinking so fast that she wouldn’t be able to catch up with her, that she had an idea what to do, but entirely for her own reasons.
“Don’t worry,” Naomi said now. “It’s just between us. You and me. We can do whatever we want. There’s nothing dangerous in it, Sam. We ought to help him.”
“Even though we don’t know who he is.”
“Does it matter who he is?”
“Yes, it matters.”
Naomi sighed. “It doesn’t matter. People like him are coming here on bits of wood. Don’t you think it’s appalling?”
“Of course I think it’s appalling. But so what?”