Anna woke at 4:00, the numbers wide-eyed on the little travel clock, and after half an hour or so slept again. It was quiet by then, and the heat had broken—though not her own, not yet. She woke not knowing who she was, with the strange slatted light on the strange wall, one of the high ornate streetlamps not far from the window, a heavy wing of shadow on the shutter, ponderous as that of a da Vinci angel. She said “Oh, Nikos, why have you dragged me here? I was happy as I was.” Or close enough: she was the one to make the rules, back home, and that was more than half the battle. She slept again.
She awakened, drenched in sweat, to the manic singing of canaries. She thought of a favorite hotel in Morelia, of making love to the man who had been her husband for years by then under the slow circling flight of a ceiling fan, before going downstairs fragrant with the musk of one another to the courtyard bar to have icy margaritas for breakfast, midmorning, against the sultry heat, and chilaquiles, some kind of delicious scramble. Behind the pink cages were the bottles: the colors of coolness, the translucent clouded colors of semi-precious gems; and the bright songs of the birds that held no shadows, no mysteries. How had she gotten back there?
But then she took in the dirty wall, the mess of bedding, her exhausted old body lying bruised by the strange bed, by the long journey to this hard country that offered no pretense of tolerance for softness or excuses, and she felt utterly deflated. It was all beyond her. What was she going to do? She felt awful. Sick still, and weak. The sleep hadn’t healed her. She felt, instead, as if she’d spent a dissipated night carousing with rotgut liquor and unpleasant people she’d had to pretend to like. When she tried to sit up, the room moved in a big gray sideways spin, like being inside the barrel of a cement mixer. She lay down again, waiting for it to stop. She felt crushed by the enormity of it, of the normality she’d lost.
“What more can this hulk suffer?” Anna berated the gods in Greek, in words from Homer she couldn’t have said she knew. She felt a keen affinity with poor Odysseus, the shabbily treated traveller, though in the days of their intimate acquaintance, with the pitiless conviction of youth, she’d thought he deserved all he got. Odysseus the sly one.
She needed to be looked after, she decided, to be nourished, made well. She’d even allow a little coddling for a change, if there were coddling to be had. Some of the Greek chicken soup, with egg and lemon—how hard would it be to get some? But no, she couldn’t eat; she felt nauseated at the thought. Her shrinking spirit wanted the luxury of immaculate surroundings—cleanness, space. A blanket to take the chill off. A hot shower. A maid. Someone she could call on if she got worse still, for she was rather frightened of the continuance of this. If it was food poisoning, as she’d thought (that hurried meal with Bill and Evelyn Prince near the airport, that rather funny-tasting macaroni salad, which might well have been sitting out for hours in the heat), then shouldn’t she be done with it by now? She lay not wanting to get up, but finally forced herself. Up, dressed, not even bothering to wash. Same wrinkled dress again. The mess was contagious. She sat down on the edge of the bed to plan her moves and save unnecessary motion. She’d already made up her mind: she would go to a hotel. One of the better ones, where she could get the attention she needed. Air-conditioning, room service, help on call. Just until she got better. Just until tomorrow. Then she’d come back, braver.
She fought to close the heavy windows and shutters against the canaries. She’d call to see what hotels had room; call a cab. She put the toilet kit back in her bag. Downstairs in the main room—even more awful by daylight, the unflattering sun prying mercilessly into the deepest buried corners, full of the watchful eyes of all those creepy dolls—she picked up the old beige rotary dial phone next to a cheap metallic transistor radio. Dead, of course. Now what? Surely a cab would come by, if she went out. She closed the windows, didn’t bother with the shutters, saw that one was coming off its hinges and pulling off plaster with it.
With immense relief, she locked the door behind her. She’d rolled the smaller of her Samsonite bags out onto the sidewalk again though she could barely manage to roll her own fool self out after it, even with the help of her stick—out into the bustle of the Greek streets, cacophonic as something from Aristophanes. So bright—the candent, soul-bared color hurt her eyes. She fumbled for her darkest glasses. The very air chafed her skin as she pushed against it. She couldn’t bear to look at anything or move any more than she had to.
She sat on her suitcase, next to the street, in the Matisse headscarf she’d bought defiantly at the museum shop the day of Ginnie’s funeral, wanting something bright. Besides the noise and light, nothing happened. No taxis came. She sat on, feeling foolish as a deposed monarch, a puppet queen whose strings have been cut. Or an overturned beetle, all those silly legs thrashing. Foiled by the need to make something happen when she didn’t quite see how. She thought crossly, “I guess I’ll need to go rout someone out—find a shop, or find a phone, which probably won’t work unless I have some kind of stupid token, which will take all kinds of fuss and bother to work out. I’ll have to put the sainted suitcase back inside.” She was wondering how ever she would manage it, when along came a sweet-faced girl in black-rimmed spectacles on one of those low scooters you propel with your feet, hopping then gliding—a real deus (deesse?) ex machina, if a rather odd modern machine—and asked in French, apparently guessing she was, if Madame didn’t maybe need some help (“Is it that I can help you, perhaps, my dear madame?”); and—“Mais oui”—pulled out a little silver cell phone to call a taxi for her—“Come soonest”—which was there within five minutes.
“Your name, child?”
“Penelope,” the girl said, sticking her hand out to be shaken.
A surreal little scene that Anna would later wonder if she had hallucinated.
She holed up at one of the A’ Class hotels on the Venetian Harbor for a week, as it happened. A shocking price, but well worth every drachma. The desk clerk, concerned for madam, had called a doctor to see her when she asked him politely in good Greek about the possibility of finding a pharmacy nearby. She stayed in bed all of the first day, huge and comfortable and clean, pure bliss; and the next, in her cotton dressing gown, moved back and forth between her terrace with the extensive very blue view and the luxury of catnaps on cool cotton sheets laundered and changed by others. She felt a pang for her own sheets, left all on their lonesome in that dreadful dump. That first night she had some tea with honey, and a very little rice from a broth with chicken and rice, thinking she ought to eat something to get her strength back. Only a couple of mouthfuls. The next morning she had a poached egg for breakfast, and because it tasted so good, the same for lunch again, with bread and a little feta, feeling her appetite come back.
That afternoon she got out the new pad she’d bought at home for the journey, and tried some sketches for the first time, though she ended by tearing most of them up. She played with colors from her set of felt-tip pens, trying to match the blues and greens of the wooden boats on the water below her, and then back inside, other things that she was seeing and feeling: the newly delightfully rediscovered textures of things. Eggshell, orange peel, sterling silver spoon—her lips reflected in its convex bowl. Cycladic goddess, ancient as the earth; all smoothed-off spoonlike curves.
She was so tired, still. She kept lying down, and sleeping. It reminded her of when she had been newly pregnant with her sons, the Changelings. But then she would rise, momentarily refreshed, and go out onto the terrace above the Sea of Crete that fed the harbor, delighted to no longer be under the lowering weight of the fever that had set her every sinew aching. Old age: bah! It wasn’t for the faint of heart, that was for damned sure.
The next day she stayed in again, because the meltemi was blowing, the fierce wind out of the north; and in any case she felt too deliciously wicked malingering—old slut! she told herself—and only wished she had friends she could invite up for tea. Impoverished Italian counts, or young Henry James heroines about to be undone by amoral old Europe; Judi Dench-type admirers of Byron from that movie she’d seen not long before coming—what had it been?; maybe even old Alexis Zorba himself, and Maria Callas, a few fiery to-hell-with-it types, and then for contrast a couple of sober Greek Orthodox priests with long beards concealing a bird’s nest or two, unknotted from their knot-like churches. Gerald had always cringed at her heartier enthusiasms, or dramatics as he called them, even though she’d often enough tried to tone herself down for him, and so not to embarrass the kiddies.
She went down to lunch, with her paperback Henry Miller, feeling the devilish urge to shock some lurking Midwesterners and Presbyterians. (Her taste in books had always offended someone. She had ordered a copy of Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead when it was first out, which Gerald seemed to imagine was about necrophilia. It embarrassed him no end, and he would whisk it out of sight into the upstairs linen cupboard when guests came over.) But no one seemed to notice her, let alone her reading material, and she relapsed immediately following the nice veal stew, stifado, with tiny new onions—though telling herself, sternly, that she was going to have to stop this soon, and get on with what she had come for.
She lay on the bed, flattened again, cussing out her sorry old carcass which had sold her out well and thoroughly. She hadn’t felt this absolutely steamrolled over by the universe, hadn’t let herself be, since the letter came, that year—the first she knew about the wretched house. Maybe it carried a curse with it, like some of those pharaohs’ tombs you heard about. It might well be the death of her yet, as it was the others. Or had it been already? Could she say with any certainty that she had lived beyond them, lived, in truth, in that radically altered world that had their killing at the heart of it? Or, rather, that inexpiable absence where its heart should have and had once been?
It had been eight months into Anna’s first pregnancy, in late September 1948, that the letter from the Greek lawyers came, informing her that Nikos had been killed in a road accident somewhere outside of Kavousi, along the Bay of Mirabello, and had (madly) left her a house—his godson’s house in Chaniá under the White Mountains, which had somehow survived the Battle of Crete when the godson and his young family hadn’t. She shook the starchy legal envelope, thinking there had to be a letter from Nikos, explaining, but there hadn’t been. (None since that last. “Forgive me. I am married.”) But the final shake brought out the little fragile watercolor she had made for him, copied from his snapshot, Nikos and the baby inside the crenelated walls of a wind-sanded Venetian fortress somewhere on the Libyan Sea before she knew him, dead to her then too at the other end of his life. That other loss of him which had seemed unbearable to the girl she was: the dreamer, the girl fortunate in love who would go to Greece with him and paint the flowering Greek plants that clambered over lissome ruins, the oregano that grew wild up the stones of interrupted stairs.
“This is rather Inconvenient,” was all she could think—capital and all, like some fusty Victorian novelist. She was a woman encumbered. Encumbered. This fleshly burden was enough already (trying unsuccessfully the first time to bend far enough to pick up the envelope with its foreign postmark which had fallen on the dear distant floor, her bulk between them, insurmountable bulwark), but a house? She envisioned the scene in The Wizard of Oz when the house came down and obliterated the wicked witch entirely, all save ruby slippers. And she had none of those, unless her shocking pink mules with the pom-poms counted. She managed on the second try, scooped letter, watercolor, envelope together out of sight into her open bag, as if that way to make them not exist again. It is impossible, she thought more plainly, ordering her thoughts and vaguely pinning up the perennial fallen strand of hair. I don’t have time for this just now.
Remembering the time, which felt out of its proper rhythm, slowed and irregular somehow like a clock needing to be wound, she launched herself, one of the more ponderous ships of the fleet bound for Troy in Homer’s catalogue, slowly out of the house and off the pristine wooden dock of the front porch, towards their good Sadie. It was her afternoon to do the altar flowers. She’d noticed earlier that her dress had brown paint the color of hard burnished hazelnuts across the front of its skirt, in two or three places, from the murderous old sisters’ window seat she’d been slopping the stuff around on (uninspired props for Arsenic and Old Lace), but she didn’t have time to change. She was meeting Ginnie after the flowers, to settle on—Ginnie told her; no more excuses—The Crib. Definitely all caps, when she’d put it off so long.
Sadie the matronly black Chrysler lolled on the driveway in the shade of mature elms. The dogs came racing down their run when they saw Anna, as far as ever they could, the sound of their eager scrambling like a handful of pebbles against the white slats of the fence. She smelled a cake baking somewhere in the neighborhood, full of good butter and yellow-hearted eggs and sifted cocoa powder, rising to a gentle swell on the middle rack of a 350-degree oven. For no reason, it made her sad. That there were around her sweet, housewifely women in clean frocks who were not left houses. She felt again like a sham. Like I am playing at all this, she thought. Rather well at times, I admit; I am getting better at it. Some days when I get into character, I almost believe in her myself. But still unconvincing overall.
Gerald, dutiful man, had taken the buckets of water from the garden shed and left them in the back room of St. Bede’s for her, with the glads she’d cut that morning while it was still cool. Sheaths of red gladioli leaning almost upright in the water in the cool sanctity of the vestry. They were like ballet dancers tall and statuesque and nonchalantly out of place in an old folk’s home, coming straight from rehearsal to visit a failing father without having stopped to change out of their brilliant tulle skirts which hung with a beautiful willful unevenness to mid-calf or so.
Each stalk was long, straight, sure. Perfect. She took one, shaking water off of it onto the sheets of butcher paper she’d brought to work on. She cut the end of it on the diagonal again, an inch higher than the morning’s cut, and pressed it down onto the frog in the bottom of one of the heavy brass vases. The pithy green stalk resisted a little as it went down onto the sharp points that would hold it upright in the vase. The gladiolus flowers were opened, sweetly ruffled, two-thirds of the way up the long stem; and the last third, those at the top, still mostly closed in on themselves. A sword sheathed. They would open one by one, always upward, in exact order, when they were ready. A calm unfolding. Not tomorrow or even the next day. After they had brought them home again on Sunday after the last service, sometime then; when she came downstairs for breakfast during the week she’d see they had begun to open while those at the bottom had started already to wilt. She cut another stem on the diagonal, shaking off water, and another and another. For now they were just right. She placed the tall stalks one by one into the vases, staggering the slightly different lengths so that the tallest glad was in the middle, like flame rising, cool flame, vestal, all its heat mysteriously burned into something chaste, lithe, free of pain.
The gladioli were insouciant red, ecstatic Hall of Mysteries red, the joyful unnecessary red of Vermeer’s woman’s red hat. Glad red. Vermilion, made from Spanish cinnabar ground to a fine powder, more costly than saffron. They were the red of wild Greek poppies, the spring poppies she never got to see, but these were late summer flowers, rather, and domesticated, obedient, American—gladioli from her garden, the regular beds she had carefully planted and tended for three years according to the seasons of dormancy and new growth, the unstated old traditions and expectations, in a decent American city, the house her husband’s good parents had helped them to buy and furnish, a legitimate house, a house she was fond of though she was having to clear the brushes and paints out of her studio to be a nursery with The Crib in place of honor because it did not, after all, have quite enough rooms.
She finished with the flowers, wrapped her shears back in the striped flour-sacking tea towel and put them in her bag (touching the guilty foreign letter which she’d stashed there not knowing where else it would be safe). She carried the heavy vases one at a time carefully with both hands into the church. The stained glass windows were empty of light at that hour of day, the colors muddy. The sun had gone around the corner of the building half an hour since. The red of the gladioli burned into the hushed air, the hymns and sacred anthems suspended in it as particles in liquid, the vast world dissolved into a momentary abeyance and held there just beyond seeing. The gold-ribbed arches of the great cathedrals whose windows were drenchings of jewels, the ancient god-trodden stones of that other land.
She placed the last vase on the thin smooth-textured cloth of the altar, which muffled the voice of brass against stone, and stood for a moment there with her eyes shut, smelling the flowers and the candle wax, feeling the gravity of everything that wasn’t visible—the worlds that were, that could, elsewhere, be; the psalms hung like dust motes in a shaft of oblique autumn light, arrow still quivering; a dust-moted dust-obscured road over the sea. And of the ordinary motions, small and precise, that continued accumulating in the face of it, as if in perfect oblivion. The seconds of a second-hand, in which the moment was nothing. “I will measure out my life in coffee spoons.” She felt her swollen belly pressed against the cool hard stone of the altar, not her own, stranger than anything. That is what is, she thought. This life for that other.
She walked with stately dignity, the firm high-headed progress of a queen, across the empty church to the little side door into the vestry, to collect her things. She was late to meet Ginnie. At the door she turned back slightly, the bulk of her hard to shift even a degree or two; let herself see the jubilant red, singing in the dimness; and went out into the ordinary afternoon to buy a baby crib.
And then, another fifty years as if nothing.
Anna looked at the wall of the hotel on Chaniá’s Venetian harbor, reflecting light from the water, as she lay old and defeated on the big bed in this place she was a lifetime late in coming to. What was the point of it now? What was it to do with her, this unanswerable light?
On the third day at the hotel, she woke with rosy-fingered dawn. It was her favorite time of day, and Homer’s too, she’d always guessed, he did go on about it so. She felt herself again, she decided, sending out cautious feelers to test the veracity of her recovery. Responding to an urge she hadn’t felt in a donkey’s age, she got out the brushes and little tubes of watercolors from the bottom of her suitcase in their hinged cherrywood box. She’d have to be careful not to splatter Prussian Blue on the light tile floor or Vermilion on the bedclothes. She would begin a painting of Chaniá on that first feverish night, her first impressions, all in squares and rounds of color like the Klee or August Macke watercolors of Tunisia she admired: the night in which there was no darkness until she closed the house door, hauling it in toward her with both hands. Sitting in the light hotel, feeling well again, she fit together the disordered pieces like one of the rich Byzantine glass mosaics, and among the squares was the dear square of his remembered face, green-burnished bronze, olive dusted with gold like a Byzantine saint.
Later, armed with guidebook and water bottle, with a little smudge of Yellow Ochre on her nose she never knew was there, she went out into the morning and was immediately disarmed. Being in it, of it. The wind was still blowing off and on, but it blew life into things, she remembered the ancient Greeks believed (there were under-ground winds too, said to cause earthquakes). It urged her deeper into the heart of things. She walked from one end of the harbor to the other, slow as could be, taking notes on colors to overlay her quick sketches—the beginnings of her color diary. Then she planted herself at a strategic café on the waterfront and asked for a coffee. It was earthy, delicious, after all the recuperative but ultimately unsatisfying tea, sketa—pure black, black as her unrepentant heathen heart. And another. With all the sediment in the cup, they were so small! Such a marvelous thing, coffee. Of course her children, the Changelings, had been decaffeinating themselves for years. She sat on in the café over an hour, watching the quickened life around her, flirting with the waiter.
The next day, he welcomed her back like a friend of many years.
“You are enjoying Chaniá, no?”
“I’ve only ventured out twice. This is the second. I know I shall enjoy it.”
In comfortably intermingled Greek and English they discussed the things she must see in the old quarters (the churches in the Splanzia, the Turkish fountain outside the archaeological museum, the excavations of the ancient city that had the name of the quince), and then the public gardens and the covered market in the new, but he was of the opinion that there were far too many foreigners on summer holiday just now (he didn’t seem to count her among them) and that she’d do best to get away to the countryside—the Akrotiri, he told her, the bulbous peninsula to the north, with olives, wild oregano and thyme, and melon fields. Or for those who preferred it, catacombs and caves. She must first see the hill with the goddess of Liberty, Eleftheria, and the grave of their great revolutionary hero Eleftherios Venizelos, then go on up into the peninsula proper to visit the monasteries.
“A good friend of my childhood has a restaurant in Korakies. You must tell him I send you to him to look after, no? You can buy beautiful embroideries for yourself at the convent there. Go for the day only or stay over—there is much for you to draw.”
He called out to a swarthy man eating with another two tables from her. “Stavros, your family is on the Akrotiri, no? How should this good lady who is an artist see the handsome faces of your monasteries?”
“My cousin and his family still live there, yes.” The two men nodded at Anna.
“This good lady will not go on a bus tour,” she said adamantly. She remembered the peninsula involving hikes into steep gullies; she had dismissed it out of hand.
“He has horses, your cousin, no?”
“Descended from the horses of Poseidon, he tells me.”
“You can go on horseback to the monasteries, no?” The men talked among themselves about the relative charms of Aghia Triadha, seventeen kilometers into the hills, with vineyards, and then the 16th century Moni Gouverneto beyond it, and beyond again, the gorge that holds the ruins of the 10th century monastery of Katholiko and the cave of St. John the Hermit. But before that was the Bear Cave dedicated to Artemis (in the shape of a bear), and outside it, the ruins of the old Panagia tis Arkoudias monastery from the 16th century, the monastery of the bear-fighting Virgin Mary, which Anna, following the back-and-forth discussion, loved the thought of—soundly unEpiscopalian.
“My cousin could take you there,” the man Stavros said to Anna, having weighed her up. “His horses are sometimes for hire.”
“And Kavousi?” she asked almost idly. “Is it possible to get there?”
“Kavousi?” The men looked doubtful.
“Near Gournia.” Nikos had described the journey to her, from Chaniá to the lace where he had begun and ended, along the north coast of the island. To where the woman archaeologist from Smith College had uncovered another ancient city on a rise, employing the whole village as workmen. Nikos himself at six had solemnly in both arms like the altar boy entrusted with the flame carried a great bucket of earth across the broken Minoan pavement to his uncles, sieving.
“Ah, Gournia.” They consulted.
“You could take a bus to Agios Nikolaus,” one thought. “Then on to Sitia—“
“—or to Ierapetra.”
“At least six hours, with the connections.”
“But you would have to stay the night.” All three of them looked as if a person would have to be crazy (foreign, that is) to do so—why in the world bother? Anna tended to agree. Especially when the waiter brought her the day’s specialty, cuttlefish cooked on charcoal; convinced her to have a little wine and then a little more. She sat on happily, talking with the men, watching the bright life of the harbor. Content to go nowhere in particular.
She felt guilty that she was avoiding returning to the house; but her heart—her very being—shrank at the thought of cleaning it out, the magnitude of the task. Worse than the Augean Stables! she thought tartly, and no rivers to divert through it. No Hercules to take it on—though she could probably run an ad in the paper asking for one; it would be amusing to see what offers she got. But even if clean, it was in any case so dismal and dark, so cramped, so little what she wanted—no studio, no room to breathe, none of the life and color to be found out here on the water. What was she to do about it? She didn’t like to give up on things; it wasn’t her way. Onwards, ever onwards—damning the torpedoes and anything else that had the effrontery to get in her way. But came a time when that was just plain foolish, and she didn’t like to be foolish either. The horns of a dilemma had her impaled, no doubt about that. The long upcurving horns of the Minoan bull that the dancer in the fresco would grab onto for vaulting, raising her lithe body cleanly between them and without fear.
It had seemed a matter that didn’t in the least concern her, back in Philadelphia, with her own ends still left to finish tying up the year following Gerald’s death; even when Ginnie had said “Oh let’s go see,” reading the letter she’d left carelessly lying on the dining table, no longer needing to conceal it. My house in Crete.
Of course that house had been a different house: a house of light and air, looking out on the harbor with the dance of lovely blue and turquoise boats like the picture in Lawrence Durrell’s book on the Greek Islands. A house of love, of history and passion, of the young Greek family—Nikos’s godson and wife and four-year-old Dmitri—before they’d died so terribly in the wife’s father’s home, bombed during the invasion of Crete by the Germans in 1941. Only a year after Nikos left her in response to that one word he couldn’t refuse. “Come.” A house equally haunted by the life which had been led in it, and that which never was. By the well-to-do Venetian merchant who had owned it first during Chaniá’s golden age. By the months Nikos stayed, when the godson had been sent with the Cretan division to the mainland to join the fighting on the Albanian front after Italy invaded. Sleeping downstairs or in one of the small rooms next to the one where she had slept, presumably, now choked with someone else’s lifetime of rubble. By the momentary stain of German occupation, after Nikos fled to the nearby mountains to join the resistance, and then eventually made his way east back to his own family’s prefecture, Lassithi, to the village of Kavousi, with the woman he would after he got there after everything they’d been through together things she the gauche American the one without such blood ties such values couldn’t begin to imagine out of that inborn grace of duty that very Greek thing that had taken him from her with no slightest hesitation on his part in going that inexorable sense of rightness make his wife.
Nothing said she had to decide just yet. She could walk away right now, retrieve her linens and suitcase and never look back—get the lawyers to sell the house outright. Though he had wanted her to have it, Nikos would surely not want it to be a burden to her, an obligation that made her miserable, now, when she had earned that halcyon last chapter of her life that even Odysseus the patsy of the gods had gotten. The circumstances simply hadn’t worked out—it was so long ago (and in another country. And now the wench is dead—or as bloody good as.) She didn’t want the house. Had never wanted it. Her secret shame, in an otherwise blameless life. And now, having seen it, even less. But if she sold it, might she miss some kind of last, finest adventure? Might she miss altogether whatever it was he was trying to tell her by leaving it to her? Some kind of gift of understanding, like the language, the epic poetry, the songs—the plaintive odes of the Greek freedom fighters in the War of Independence they had listened to far into many nights on Walnut Street on his old Victrola. . . . Leaving her heart blind, in the end. Old Oedipus led around at Colonnos, for his sins. Could she really risk that?
She watched a man cleaning sea urchins in a doorway: the hands, the spiky pools of India ink. A yellow basket between his knees and big boots. Another painting for the taking. Another of the gifts for the spirit Greece was so lavish with. How ungrateful she would be to spurn them, say no thank you I would rather not if you don’t mind, I do not dare to eat a peach or wear my trousers rolled, I’ve made a little mistake coming, please don’t mind me if I just slip off home.
Nothing says you have to decide yet, you old horror, she repeated. She felt cowardly, but immediately lighter, resolving that she would not decide until she’d seen what she wanted of the country on her own terms: on horseback, on foot, on moped if need be, or on a little foot scooter like that girl Penelope’s, from the shade of old gnarled olives or stripy blue umbrellas, and right out in the sun. She’d play the tourist shamelessly, and not resent having missed that, at least—missed everything, in a Jamesian phrase. She would want to see the country; see if she wanted to come back for a longer time, to stay, part of each year, or the whole year—or not at all. She was, after all, an old old lady, entitled to her fits and eccentricities. Yes, she’d see. She’d look for interesting companions on the way, for it wouldn’t be nearly so satisfying without. Judi Dench and the others had failed to come to tea only because they didn’t know where to find her, so she’d jolly well go scare them up. She might as well see what the island had to offer, before she turned tail and fled howling for home.
And what was there, in any case, besides the dreary heckling of her children and the pious do-gooders like Bill and Evelyn Prince?
She left the restaurant, at almost four o’clock, with the name and number of the cousin with the horses, for the day after tomorrow or the day after that. There was no hurry; she had all the time in the world. She would see the town, poke into museums and bookshops, find the covered market said to be as chock-full of wonderful local produce as Marseilles’s. She would ride into the mountains, paint what she found there, mountains startling in their whiteness and wild blue promontories, go all the way up the peninsula to the little knob at the top outthrust into the sea, see every monastery ever built and then some, and come back with saddle sores and some kind of a fair decision. She would hitchhike where the mood took her, eat good hearty peasant fare with good hearty peasants, collect recipes and cuttings (some of those wild iris bulbs, maybe), see what she would see. The house would just damned well have to wait for her, and stop thinking it could run her life—at eighty any more than at twenty-eight. She had her strength back now, and she would not put money on its chances if she chose to take it on.
The real danger was not that it would take her life as it had those others; that had been taken care of quietly those years ago. But that it would, instead, changing its tack, come after her from the opposite bearing. Not taking but giving—a reawakening that could not be endured. Painful resuscitation, the invasive life-breath. You could give orders now, do not resuscitate, but not to the god or his cronies, the hell-bent archaeologists. Taking fragments too minute too damaged, worn away by weather and by time to be identified, and forcing human need upon them. Finding the suggestion of an arm or arching back on a Minoan palace wall, a paint-ghost haunting the absences they can’t accept they are left with, and making a woman from it—and another—women gathering saffron. They must, being men (wretched Pygmalion), having breathed first into the awful void, give breath to these imagined women, women who have lived (they tell themselves proprietarily) beyond all reckoning.
Until of course, to everyone’s surprise, the saffron-gatherers in what is left of the fresco (and she had seen in the Heraklion museum how shockingly little that is) turn out through infrared and all the devices of modern science, lies and fever dreams aside, to be not women after all—but blue monkeys, a splendid cerulean or cyan.
Yes, she thought, anticipating the moment of discomfiture. How surprised they would all be.
