Soon it was as if I had imagined everything. I lay awake for at least another hour. Nothing more happened; and no hypothesis made sense.
I had entered the domaine.
22
Someone was knocking at the door. Through the shadowy air of the open window, the burning sky. A fly crawled across the wall above the bed. I looked at my watch. It was half-past ten. I went to the door, and heard the slap of Maria’s slippers going downstairs.
In the glaring light, the racket of cicadas, the events of the night seemed in some way fictional; as if I must have been slightly drugged. But my mind didn’t seem fuzzled; I felt fit and clearheaded. I dressed and shaved and went down to breakfast under the colonnade. The taciturn Maria appeared with coffee.
“O kyrios?” I asked.
“Ephage. Eine epano.” Has eaten; is upstairs. Like the villagers, with foreigners she made no attempt to speak more comprehensibly, but uttered her usual fast slur of vowel sounds.
I had my breakfast and carried the tray back along the side colonnade and down the steps to the open door of her cottage. The front room was fitted out as a kitchen. With its old calendars, its lurid cardboard ikons, its bunches of herbs and shallots and its blue-painted meat-safe hanging from the ceiling, it was like any other cottage living-kitchen of Phraxos. Only the utensils were rather more ambitious, and the stove larger. I went in and put the tray on the table.
Maria appeared out of the back room; I glimpsed a large brass bed, more ikons, photographs. A shadow of a smile creased her mouth; but it was circumstantial, not genuine. It would have been difficult enough in English to ask questions without appearing to be prying; in my Greek it was impossible. I hesitated a moment, then saw her face, as blank as the door behind her, and gave up.
I went through the passage between house and cottage to the vegetable garden. On the western side of the house a shuttered window corresponded to the door at the end of Conchis’s bedroom. It appeared as if there was something more than a cupboard there. Then I looked up at the north-facing back of the house, at my own room. It was easy to hide behind the rear wall of the cottage, but the ground was hard and bare; showed nothing. I strolled on into the arbor. The little Priapus threw up his arms at me, jeering his pagan smile at my English face.
No entry.
Ten minutes later I was down on the private beach. The water, blue and green glass, was for a moment cold, then deliciously cool; I swam out between the steep rocks to the open sea. After a hundred yards or so I could see behind me the whole cliffed extent of the headland, and the house. I could even see Conchis, who was sitting where we had sat on the terrace the night before, apparently reading. After a while he stood up, and I waved. He raised both his arms in his peculiar hieratic way, a way in which I knew now that there was something deliberately, not fortuitously, symbolic. The dark figure on the raised white terrace; legate of the sun facing the sun; the most ancient royal power. He appeared, wished to appear, to survey, to bless, to command; dominus and domaine. And once again I thought of Prospero; even if he had not said it first, I should have thought of it then. I dived, but the salt stung my eyes and I surfaced. Conchis had turned away—to talk with Ariel, who put records on; or with Caliban, who carried a bucket of rotting entrails; or perhaps with… but I turned on my back. It was ridiculous to build so much on the sound of quick footsteps, the merest glimpse of a white shape.
When I got back to the beach ten minutes later he was sitting on the balk. As I came out of the water he stood and said, “We will take the boat and go to Petrocaravi.” Petrocaravi, the “ship of stone,” was a deserted islet half a mile off the tip of Phraxos. He was dressed in swimming shorts and a garish red-and-white water-polo player’s cap, and in his hand he had the blue rubber flippers and a pair of underwater masks and snorkels. I followed his brown old back over the hot stones.
“Petrocaravi is very interesting underwater. You will see.”
“I find Bourani very interesting above water.” I had come up beside him. “I heard voices in the night.”
“Voices?” But he showed no surprise.
“The record. I’ve never had an experience quite like it. An extraordinary idea.” He didn’t answer, but stepped down into the boat and opened the engine housing. I untied the painter from its iron ring in the concrete, then squatted on the jetty and watched him fiddle inside the hatch. “I suppose you have speakers in the trees.”
“I heard nothing.”
I teased the painter through my hand, and smiled. “But you know I heard something.”
He looked up at me. “Because you tell me so.”
“You’re not saying, how extraordinary, voices, what voices. That would be the normal reaction, wouldn’t it?” He gestured rather curtly to me to get aboard. I stepped down and sat on the thwart opposite to him. “I only wanted to thank you for organizing a unique experience for me.”
“I organized nothing.”
“I find it hard to believe that.”
We remained staring at each other. The red-and-white skullcap above the monkey eyes gave him the air of a performing chimpanzee. And there stood the sun, the sea, the boat, so many unambiguous things, around us. I still smiled; but he wouldn’t smile back. It was as if I had committed a faux pas by referring to the singing. He stooped to fit the starting handle.
“Here, let me do that.” I took the handle. “The last thing I want to do is to offend you. I won’t mention it again.”
I bent to turn the handle. Suddenly his hand was on my shoulder. “I am not offended, Nicholas. I do not ask you to believe. All I ask you is to pretend to believe. Just pretend to believe. It will be easier.”
It was strange. By that one gesture and a small shift in expression and tone of voice, he resolved the tension between us. I knew on the one hand that he was playing some kind of trick on me; a trick like the one with the loaded die. On the other, I felt that he had after all taken a sort of liking for me. I thought, as I heaved at the engine, if he wants me to seem his dupe, I’ll seem his dupe; but not be his dupe.
We headed out of the cove. It was difficult to talk with the engine going, and I stared down through fifty or sixty feet of water to patches of pale rock starred black with sea urchins. On Conchis’s left side were two puckered scars. They were both back and front, obviously bullet wounds; and there was another old wound high on his right arm. I guessed that they came from the execution during the second War. Sitting there steering he looked ascetic, Gandhi-like; but as we approached Petrocaravi, he stood up and steered the tiller expertly against his dark thigh. Years of sunlight had tanned him to the same mahogany brown as the island fishermen.
The rocks were gigantic boulders of conglomerate, monstrous in their barren strangeness, much larger now we were close to them than I had ever realized from the island. We anchored about fifty yards away. He handed me a mask and snorkel. At that time they were unobtainable in Greece, and I had never used them before.
I followed the slow, pausing thresh of his feet over a petrified landscape of immense blocks of stone, among which drifted and hovered shoals of fish. There were flat fish, silvered, aldermanic; slim, darting fish; Bosch-like fish that peered foully out of crevices; minute poised fish of electric blue, fluttering red-and-black fish, slinking azure-and-green fish. He showed me an underwater grotto, a light-shafted nave of pale blue shadows, where the large wrasse floated as if in a trance. On the far side of the islet the rocks plunged precipitously away into a mesmeric blind dark blue. Conchis raised his head above the surface.