A few young tourists were already at the port when Faoud arrived there at five in the morning. One of the cafes was slowly opening for them. He ordered a coffee and sat inconspicuously among the crowd until the darkness began to break up across the sea and the ferry gates opened. It was a wait of an hour. During that time he listened to the chatter of the travelers while watching the quay for police. Most of the former, as far as he could gather, were headed for the airport in Athens. He listened, but his mind was in pieces and the disassembled fragments whirled around according to the laws of disintegration. His father had always warned him to keep to himself and not to talk to people too offhandedly, and now more than ever, it seemed like good advice, which suggested that his father knew the ways of the world better than Faoud had realized. He kept to himself and counted down the minutes while trying to forget the event that had just happened, ten or fifteen seconds of violence that he had never foreseen and which had happened so unexpectedly that when it was finished all he was able to do was close the door and run.
So the crisis had come. But it had left him cold and lethargically calm. The terror will come later, he thought. He recalled a few words from the sura of Al-Isra, though he couldn’t say why they mattered to him or why he remembered them now. They were about the journey that the Prophet had taken from the Kaba after he had fallen asleep there—the journey to Jerusalem, where he had prayed with the other prophets and glimpsed the Lotus of the Utmost Boundary. It was the moment when the Prophet had received the tenets of the faith, if he had not misunderstood it. It was the Angel Gabriel who had taken him to Jerusalem and then back to Mecca, after lifting him beyond space and time. And he saw the Garden of Abode as well, encircling the Lotus.
At six-thirty the small boat from Metochi arrived. Only he got on it. When they pulled out from Hydra, he turned once and looked behind him at the other passengers on the quay who were waiting for the larger Athens ferry. But all was normal and no one, apparently, had noticed him. Thus it was both fate and Allah’s will, and about those it was absurd to have an opinion.
—
At Metochi inlets and coves appeared half-lit in the first sun; there were fields of reeds with the water luminous around them. Three people waited at the jetty, lone figures in seemingly open countryside. He came down the gangplank onto the quay and saw at once that there was no security in such a lonely place and that the paid parking lot lay only a short walk from the boat. He went into it without hurrying or drawing attention to himself and went down the rows of cars until he had found the navy-blue Peugeot with a sunscreen drawn across its rear window. The ticket touts for the Hydra boats were not even open yet and the fields echoed with collared doves. A perfect blue sky.
He pressed the button on the key ring to open the doors and the car’s lights flashed and the locks slid open with a quiet shuffle. He opened a back door and threw in the bag, then thought better of it and removed it to the trunk, which was almost empty except for a toolkit and the spare tire.
In the confusion his temples burned, his mouth had gone dry and sticky, and yet he had to resist the hysteria and assert the calm that his elders had always admired in him even as a boy. He took a while to compose himself, therefore, and to look through the glove compartment. The car was not yet hot, but even so, his fingers slipped in their own sweat. There were road maps, the Patras ferry ticket for two persons and the car. There was a bound notebook with Jimmie’s emergency details printed out on a single sheet inserted into the fly. He would read it later. There was also the parking coupon, which was prepaid.
He opened the map first and looked at the roads flung across Greece. He found Patras and saw that once he got to the isthmus the road from Corinth was more or less direct. He measured it: three or four hours, maybe. He had to go onward, second by second, minute by minute. He pushed his panicked thoughts to the side of his mind and forced himself to think about the distances again: how long would it take? One could never tell from a map, and he intended to drive as slowly as he could. No stops by the highway police, no exuberance. The road from Metochi went up to Ermioni and from there inland up to Epidavros. A road through sleepy villages, and at Nea Epidavros it touched the sea again. It was not a difficult route.
He drove along the sea road to Thermisia. It was very different from Hydra. Few tavernas, only the farmhouses and their quiet orchards. By the road stood red signs for a thing called Silk Oil. He went past the arrows for Ermioni and saw for a moment that marine village’s flat-roofed houses scattered across a hill. Soon thereafter the road rose steeply, and the sea was below him when he stopped to recover his senses and to reclaim his calm among fragrant macquis and the tinkling of goat bells in the ravines. It was a terraced land filled with crooked trees and a subtle sense of relation to a sea that was just out of sight. From under the trees came a menacing drone of bees. Farther on the land became drier and more vast. After only an hour the horror which he had been unexpectedly sucked into was no longer fresh. On this ever-curling road it suddenly seemed more distant than it actually was, and a numbing absence of fear had returned.
An hour and a half after leaving Metochi the road swung over another sea, but so high up that he had to look down at it from afar. The signs in English said Nea Epidavros and he could see it below as well, an arc of red tiles and white around a bay. The sun was high enough to enfold the land by the time he reached a mountainside bar called Stork, whose wide terraces overlooked the same town and the forested peninsulas around it. Inside it was sleek and hip; a place for the local well-heeled. He took an outside table and ordered coffee and orange juice, and waited for something inside himself to catch up with the luminosity around him. As he sipped his orange juice, two priests, black as ravens in tall hats, came and sat a table away from him. Groomed and suave men with dandy beards. Faoud glanced away from them, but they noticed him and appeared disdainful. Little birds began to swarm around them.
—