Faoud seemed to understand what had been discussed.
“I think you should shave now,” she said. “You look like a cannibal. It’s almost depressing.” He agreed, and he seemed to find it amusing, saying that the old people in the houses were afraid of him—isn’t that what they had said? But he caught Sam’s eye as he spoke, and in some way that quieted him.
“Not really. But you’ll look better cleaned up.”
They had brought scissors as well, and Sam offered to cut his hair. She sat behind him and sheared off the matted excess hair while he shaved, the reflection of his face held still in the mirror. She enjoyed it; she’d never done anything like that before. The slope of his neck was that of a girl’s; his skin could have been coated with honey.
When she was finished she brushed the hair from his shoulders and looked at him from the side. It was a remarkable improvement. Naomi asked if he wanted to go for a swim; there was a remote path that went down from Episkopi to the far side which no one used.
“I know it,” he said. “But I think it would be better to stay here. Someone will see us.”
“It’s not the end of the world if they did. You’re respectable now. Let’s go down there.”
He hesitated, then relented. A swim with two girls. “What did you tell the farmers?” he asked.
“I said you were a friend.”
“They won’t believe it. I don’t look like a friend, and they know it.”
“Maybe they don’t care. I brought you some T-shirts and a sweater. Don’t thank me—they were cheap.”
He put on one of the T-shirts and suddenly he looked clean-cut, austere, and curiously middle class. What he really needed was a shower, but it would have to wait.
“We’ll clean you up, and then I can get you a room in the port.”
They had brought a box of eggs, and Sam took them out now so that he could eat them raw, one after the other.
Then he lay down in the grass. The cessation of hunger had relaxed him.
“You’re not a very good Greek,” he said to Naomi. “You burn like an Irish girl. Are you Irish?”
“How would you know about Irish girls?”
“Well, then,” he began:
“I’ve been around. I went to Paris and London when I was small. My father took me. He told me everyone there was really Irish. He bought me a tie at Old England. Do you know that store?”
Naomi shook her head, and she was incredulous, her heart skipping a beat to find that he was more bourgeois than she was.
“It’s near the Opéra in Paris. My father loved it. He bought all his ties there. He still had them when he died. I would have inherited them if I’d stayed.”
So, Sam thought slowly, listening to this, you come from money. You know what Old England ties are, and your father was a man of leisure.
“You haven’t said where you’re from,” she said. “We thought it would be rude to ask—so I’m not asking.”
“I don’t mind if you ask, because I won’t tell you.”
She took out the strawberries they had brought and the yogurt. Dessert.
“Mais tu me gatés!” he cried, and swore he would buy them dinner when he was rich again. His fingers, as they darted for the fruit, were suddenly elegant and discriminating.
“We’ll see if you do,” Sam retorted.
It didn’t seem likely. For some reason she disliked his use of a French phrase, though she knew it was irritable on her part, and there was something in his unexpected confidence that struck her as being less innocent than Naomi wanted to believe. When he glanced at her his eyes were clear of all deference or doubt. He seemed to know what he was looking at, and it was not an indulgent knowledge. Her pride flared up in defense of herself, and she thought of a few sharp words she could fling at him later on, when the right occasion presented itself. It was a little more than the usual male insolence.
They ate the yogurt on plastic spoons and threw the strawberries to each other one by one. Maybe, Naomi thought, this silly laughter will reach all the way down to the shepherd with the shotgun. Gossip and islands were natural conspirators, but the time for caring about it was almost gone.
Naomi wondered whether she could bring him down to the port and check him into a hotel without a passport, or using her own. It was one way of bringing him back into civilization. Then she considered buying him a ferry ticket and getting him to the mainland. Yet there was no possibility of continuation in this plan once he got there. She could give him money and send him on his way. Yes—that would work. He would take the money gratefully and move on, or so she imagined. But it was offhand and cruel, and moreover a waste of an opportunity. It seemed to her that there was something magical in this sudden appearance of another human being; it was surely a sign, as she had thought before. She could bribe someone in the port to take him in. But then she would lose her influence over him, and nor did that seem right. She was the savior and she relished the role. It made her vital in a new way. To save another person: it wasn’t nothing. It wasn’t exactly an achievement, but it was a small shift in the balance of power toward the weak. Such shifts were the substance of one’s moral life—they made the intolerable tolerable. She thought back to what Sam had said that day about atonement, and she realized now that the need for atonement was hers. She was righting the wrongs that she herself had committed, even though rationally speaking the two were not connected. Idiotic, but there it was. She had been haunted by the wronged Turk in Dalston for months, and with time it had begun to fester within her. Whether it was a small failure or a large one was immaterial; a chain reaction had been set in motion by her ineptitude and cowardice, and it would carry on creating havoc out of sight and mind for as long as that person lived. Such things did not end when one lost interest in them. Their consequences continued even if one didn’t have to live with them oneself. Morality was nothing more than paying attention to the chain reaction while not causing another one. She was feeding an unknown man strawberries on the hill outside Episkopi and she was enjoying it. He seemed to be enjoying it as well. He ought to be, she thought with gratification.
Then, as an entertainment, she brought out another small packet of the weed she had bought from the boat girl, though she wasn’t sure how he would respond to it. But he understood what it was at once and didn’t push it away. Her gifts were a success.