Naomi turned on her back as well and she smiled, almost to the point of breaking into laughter. The kite-flyer almost losing control, but remembering at the last moment that her kite had to remain airborne at all costs.
She had hardly slept from then on, though the revolution didn’t come that night or even during the following morning. When they were taking their mute breakfast together at their window the city below them refused to throw a single insurrectionary sound their way. It was only the seabirds prowling a wide summer-vacation blue sky who projected their cries downward while the protestors of the night before appeared to have gone to sleep in the middle of the revolt. Everything was therefore quiet. Sunlight lay on a pot of hotel jam and the girl’s long fingers picking at things with a delicate indecision: Naomi shaded her eyes with one hand to look at her, admiring once again the undiminished fineness that she had relished the first minute she had set eyes on her at the beach at Mandraki. Sam was nearing the end of a long and fruitful innocence. But was it really a war they were in now, or had they already won it?
NINETEEN
Near Lake Bolseno, as the sun fell behind cypresses that made him think of Hajez, Faoud passed through a place called Valentano and then onto a road that made its way alongside the waters past little camping grounds and shuttered stalls with the word Fragola written across them. Beyond the lake another road rose steeply along the edge of a colossal ravine as it approached Sorano, a place that he was sure was inhabited only by the old. When he got there at ten the piazza was already empty and that suspicion was confirmed. The village was a honeycomb of caves and abandoned houses clinging to a great spur of rock, and when he got out for a few minutes to test the air and to regain his sense of place he heard at once the birds that gave Sorano most of its nocturnal life.
Close to the entrance of the old town a terrace hung above the ravine that could be half-seen by the glare of the piazza lamps. Water churned along the bottom, and he could see the mouths of caves where the Etruscans had once buried their dead. For a moment, leaning against the rail, he was compelled to remember Aleppo before the ruin. The impeccable city where he had studied years earlier at the music school of Frenchman Julian Weiss, master of the qanan. The nostalgia came out of nothing but the sepulchral abandonment of Sorano at a late hour. Houses carved out of the rock, thousands of years compressed into simple walls and arches and secret doors. But the Syrian stones he would never see again.
Sovana, by contrast, lay at the bottom of a road that descended into an archaeological site. The road crossed a river and near to the waters lay the Codrington house, accessed not by a normal driveway but by a dirt track that wound its way through an orchard of quince trees. He left the car on the far side of the orchard, locking it and taking his bag. A footpath led to a tall iron gate that had to be unlocked. He had various keys from the car, and in the darkness he fumbled with one key after another until one turned and the gate opened. The house was low and very long, like an enormous stable, though it had two stories. Before it lay a bedraggled garden with pieces of statuary and a well. He went to the front door and negotiated the three locks one by one until he was able to push it open and walk into a hallway of flagstones, beams, and austere open stonework. Groping for the light switch, he turned on the overhead lamp and found himself in a restored convent with long white corridors and lines of cell doors. Parchment maps in frames hung on the walls, time-darkened religious paintings and strange wooden ladles, the instruments of forgotten nuns.
Closing the front door quietly behind him, he locked it again with a horizontal iron bolt and took his bag into a salon to the right of the hallway. It had been created from the former chapel, with arches rising above velvet sofas and a Renaissance dining table. The Codringtons had not departed hastily. The shutters were all bolted shut, the armchairs and tables were sheeted. In the heat of summer the rooms were cool because the outside air had not touched them in weeks.
He ventured upstairs with his bag and found that the former convent cells were now individual bedrooms, each one decorated differently. Some were painted rose, some green or yellow. But they were all adorned with antiques and wall tapestries. He chose the smallest one and laid his bag there, then went back downstairs and explored the vast Codrington kitchen, a place where the impertinent twenty-first century imposed itself in a score of German gadgets. He scoured the fridge and found nothing there. They had cleaned everything out before leaving, and even the freezer was empty. A little crushed, he tried the pantry and the cupboards. It was the same disaster. Impossible, he thought. Rich people didn’t live in empty houses, even if they left them for weeks or months at a time. But the kitchen, in fact, had been very carefully evacuated and he couldn’t find even a lonely can to offset the calamity. They had emptied it out and probably taken everything with them to Greece. Because the other side of the rich was their hidden and repulsive frugality.
He decided to sleep instead and deal with the situation the following morning. Going back upstairs, he crashed onto the bed in his clothes and let his gradually accumulated exhaustion overwhelm him. But it didn’t take him into sleep directly. His mind, instead, spun with images of Istanbul. He hadn’t thought about the city for a long time, not even when he was alone in the hut in Episkopi, but now it came back to him, that city of humiliations.