—
At Palamidas they waited for a while in the shade of a looming hill near the water. It was a desolate place, but lit by the fairy waters. The same pieces of rusted machinery littered the broken-up quay as at Mandraki. A small lamp with a solar panel attached to it, jetties with tires strapped to their sides. The beach was littered with splintered wood, like the scene of an explosion in a matchbox house. It was a place preoccupied by its own labors.
“What did you say to him?” Sam finally asked.
“Just money talk. I’m going to put Faoud in that hovel and the old man is going to rent it to me for the summer. It’ll be all right until I figure out something better.”
“He’ll be expecting a boutique hotel I bet.”
“Faoud?”
“He looks a little spoiled to me.”
“That’s not really the right word, is it? You don’t like him, do you?”
Sam shrugged and crossed her feet. She was merely grateful to be out of the punishing sun. She didn’t have any feelings about Faoud that weren’t physical, instinctual, and unthought.
“I don’t care one way or the other,” she felt compelled to state.
“I don’t believe you. You didn’t like him—I could tell.”
“But you do,” Sam said.
“So now it’s me?”
“You were all over him.”
“You were looking him over. You’re not fooling me.”
“Come on, I wasn’t.”
“I saw it all. It doesn’t matter anyway. You can like who you want.”
Sam looked away for a moment. She had to decide whether to be honest or to spin a tale. In the corner of her eye she had caught the arthritic motion of two old women in the black garb of a previous century making their way across the space behind the landing in the shade of a dark rose parasol. Humans are like spiders in their old age, moving from shadow to shadow in the bright sun, inexhaustible in their way. She would never end up like that, even if she stayed here for the rest of her life, which of course she wouldn’t. In New York, she wouldn’t age like that. She would rebel. Then she decided not to answer Naomi at all: yes, Faoud was beautiful, but she didn’t see any reason to explain being interested in that. It was her business, her weakness, if it was a weakness at all, and it was purely a private crisis. Beautiful things subdue. It didn’t concern anyone else. It was a mystery within one devotee. They sailed, therefore, back to Hydra in silence. Sam was happy with that. When they got to Kamini the girl disembarked, kissed Naomi’s cheek, and walked off to the family villa alone on the long path to Vlychos. Naomi went back to Belle Air and slept through the afternoon.
—
The Haldanes had dinner at home that night. The maid made lemon soup and moussaka, and as they ate on the patio, lightning flickered against the edge of the nocturnal sea. Thunder rolled in after it, distant and soft, and the wind picked up; the candle flames guttered. “So it’s going to rain?” her mother said, looking up at her and trying to guess where her daughter had been for so many hours earlier that day. After the meal was finished and the plates cleared away, Sam lay on the outdoor sofa and ate galaktoboureko with cups of Lipton’s doused in sliced lemon. The family gathered around the coffee table with jazz on the record player, and bits of paper flew around the patio on the gusts of wind. Her father, his newspaper open wide—yesterday’s Tribune—tapped his foot to the Louis Jordan and puffed at his pipe.
“By the way,” he drawled, not removing the stem, “your mother and I were stopped by the police walking back from the port. Can you imagine? Guys with automatics. We nearly had a brawl.”
“It wasn’t me who got upset,” Amy put in immediately.
“They stopped us and asked us for our passports. Obviously we didn’t have them on us.”
The paper lowered, and Jeffrey caught his daughter’s eye from the other side of the glass table.
“Has that happened to you, Sam?”
“Never.”
“You see, Amy? They stop middle-aged people in broad daylight but not kids on the lam all night. Stupid as they are intrusive.”
Sam suggested that it was just the summer drugs season. But Jeffrey insisted on the “lurch to the right” that was all the talk in the Tribune. Had they seen what was happening in Hungary and Poland?
She yawned, lying on her side, and resolved not to allow any of his peroration to penetrate her inner calm. She knew why there were armed police on the island because she already knew more than her father in that regard. It was easy enough to piece together. Curiously, she didn’t share any of his outrage at the rightward lurch, the demanding of passports, the events in Hungary. She had been listening to the same social justice indignations all her life, and gradually they had lost their effect on her. What did the word “fascist” mean after all these years, after all the repetitions and misuse? She heard it all the time in school, and it was a word that now passed her by in the night. As she reached her twenty-first year she began to realize that she intuited more about the world as it really was than her well-informed father, precisely because everything he knew was pre-known from texts and could not be contradicted by any real lived experience—because he didn’t have any. Whereas she had looked into the eyes of Faoud and kept it a secret from him. Her father’s indignations seemed naive and bookish. But she listened for a while and agreed with him, then stood and announced that she was going up to sleep. It was a way of not being abrupt or rude. He nodded, however, obviously perplexed. Was there something wrong with her?
She kissed her mother’s hot face and said she was tired. The rain was coming. On her bed upstairs she lay with the windows open, listening to it falling quietly over the pines, and her thoughts drifted until a message came from Naomi: All done with the shipwreck.
Sam texted back, Well done. That was gutsy.
Ten minutes later came another text: Exhausted, going to sleep for 24 hours.
Me too, she wrote back, and then the messages fell silent for the night. But although it was true that she was exhausted, she couldn’t sleep. She thought about Faoud in the hut at the far end of the island and the faces of the two shepherds, which had seemed, at least to her, to be full of duplicitous resolutions. But maybe that was wrong. My imagination, she thought dismissively. But still, she didn’t quite believe herself. She didn’t quite believe in her own disinterest in Faoud either. More than that: she wondered if the young man lying on that pallet in the dark was thinking about her in turn, and she was quite sure that, in his way, he was.
SIX