At first I thought the concierge was ten or fifteen years older than I was. The small girl clinging to his leg I took to be a granddaughter. It was a while before I saw I would have to adjust the relative levels, bring his age down, mine up. Most Greek men at forty seem totally fixed, part of the settled earth, assigned by time and custom to a particular set of duties, a certain face, a walk, a way of saying and doing. I was still waiting to be surprised by life. I was always coming or going, he was there, out on the sidewalk or behind his desk in the dark lobby, doing his records, drinking coffee.He didn't know a word of English. My Greek was so tentative and insecure I began to wish I could avoid the man. But it wasn't possible to get by him without a sentence or two passing between us. He might ask about Tap, remark on the weather. Understanding him, answering correctly, was like making my way through a dream. I used to squint into his face, trying to pick a word out of the surge and glut, something that might give me a clue to what the subject was.Hot.Hot.Very hot.If I came into the lobby with groceries in a clear plastic bag he'd look over from his slot behind the desk and name the items one by one. At times I found myself repeating what he said or even saying the words before he did, when I knew them. I would lift the bag slightly as I walked by, making it easier for him to see. Bread, milk, potatoes, butter. The concierge had this power over me. He had the advantage, the language, and what I felt most often, passing in or out of his presence, was a childlike fear and guilt.Aside from a limited vocabulary I had severe shortcomings when it came to pronunciation. Place-names were a special problem. Whenever I got off the elevator with a suitcase, Niko would ask where I was going. Sometimes he did this with a small hand-twisting gesture. A simple thing, destination, but often I had difficulty telling him. Either I'd forget the Greek word or I'd have trouble pronouncing it. I'd put the accent in the wrong place, mess up the x sound, the r that follows the t. The word would come out flat and pale, a Minnesota city, and I'd head off to the airport feeling I'd been unable to satisfy some obscure requirement.In time I began to lie. I would tell him I was going to a place that had a name I could easily pronounce. What a simple, even elegant device this seemed. Let the nature of the place-name determine the place. I felt childish, of course. This was part of his power over me. But the lies began to worry me after a while in a way that had nothing to do with childishness. There was something metaphysically disturbing about them. A grave misplacement. They were not simple but complex. What was I tampering with, the human faith in naming, the lifelong system of images in Niko's brain? I was leaving behind in the person of the concierge an enormous discrepancy between my uttered journey and the actual movements I made in the external world, a four-thousand-mile fiction, a deep lie. The lie was deeper in Greek than it would have been in English. I knew this without knowing why. Could reality be phonetic, a matter of gutturals and dentals? The smoky crowded places where we did business were not always as different to us as the names assigned to them. We needed the names to tell them apart, in a sense, and I was playing fast and loose with this curious truth. And when I returned, how foolish I felt as he asked me how things had gone in England, Italy or Japan. Retribution. I might have been wishing an air crash on myself or an earthquake on an innocent city, the city whose name I had uttered.I also lied when I went to Turkey. I could handle the word for Turkey, it was one of my better words, but I didn't want Niko to know I went there. He looked political.That night I thought of Ann, the cities she'd lived in, what kind of bargains she'd struck with her husband and lovers. I thought of her affairs, sentimentally, as preparations for the loss she knew was coming. It was her husband's job that took her to a place, then took her away. Places, always places. Her memory was part of the consciousness of lost places, a darkness that ran deep in Athens. There were Cypriots here, Lebanese, Armenians, Alexandrians, the island Greeks, the northern Greeks, the old men and women of the epic separation, their children, grandchildren, the Greeks of Smyrna and Constantinople. Their true home was to the spacious east, the dream, the great idea. Everywhere the pressure of remembrance. The black memory of civil war, children starving. Through the mountains we see it in the lean faces of men in flyspeck villages, stubble on their jaws. They sit beneath the meter on the café wall. There's a bleakness in their gazing, an unrest. How many dead in your village? Sisters, brothers. The women walk past with donkeys carrying bricks. There were times when I thought Athens was a denial of Greece, literally a paving over of this blood memory, the faces gazing out of stony landscapes. As the city grew it would consume the bitter history around it until nothing was left but gray streets, the six-story buildings with laundry flying from the rooftops. Then I realized the city itself was an invention of people from lost places, people forcibly resettled, fleeing war and massacre and each other, hungry, needing jobs. They were exiled home, to Athens, which spread toward the sea and over the lesser hills out into the Attic plain, direction-seeking. A compass rose of memory.
5
People were always giving her shirts. Their own in most cases. She looked good in everything; everything fit. If a shirt was too loose, too big, the context would widen with the material and this became the point, this was the fit. The shirt would sag fetchingly, showing the girl, the sunny tomboy buried in hand-me-down gear. She used to snatch things off hangers in Yonge Street basements, the kind of shapeless stuff men wore north. These were stores with hunting knives in faded scabbards in the window, huge khaki anoraks with fur-lined hoods, and she'd grab a pair of twelve-dollar corduroys that became immediately hers, setting off her litheness, the close-skinned physical sense she expressed even sprawled across an armchair, reading. Her body had efficient lines that took odd clothing best, the weathered, the shrunken, the dull. People were pleased to see her in their work-shirts, old sweaters. She was not a friend who asked many favors or required of others a steadfastly sympathetic nature. They were flattered, really, when she took a shirt.
I stood watching from the deck. In the west the sun was banded, fading down a hazy slate horizon. We moved along the rocky coast and came booming in heavy gusts around the point. The village danced in light. As we approached there was a momentary lull, landward. Things seemed to pause to let the flesh tone seep in. Contours were defined, white walls massed around the belltower. Everything was clear and deep.The ship passed into a silence. Protected now. Old men came out to catch the hawsers.I saw her walk with Tap into the square. The shirt she wore was identifiable from a distance. Long, straight, tan, with brass studs and red-rimmed epaulets. She wore it outside her jeans. A carabiniere shirt. Long sleeves, sturdy fabric. The nights were getting cool.I hadn't seen the shirt in years but easily recalled who had given it to her.She asked about Cairo. I left my bag at the hotel desk. Up the cobbled streets, jasmine and donkey shit, the conversational shriek of older women. Tap walked on ahead, knowing she had something to tell me."We had a strange visit. A figure from the past. Out of absolutely nowhere.”"Everyone is from the past.”"Not everyone is a figure," she said. "This person qualifies as a figure.”We were taking unnaturally long strides on the broad steps. Some girls sang a song that began with the words one two three."Volterra," I said.She glanced."You're wearing his shirt. Practically an announcement. Not only that. The moment you started talking I knew you were going to say something about him. I realized the shirt meant more than the season is starting to change.”"That's amazing. Because the funny thing is I didn't even know I had the bloody shirt. Frank left three days ago. I found the shirt this morning. I'd totally forgotten the thing existed.”"A mock heirloom as I recall. Those were the days when he wasn't sure what he wanted to look and sound like to others. The young man obsessed by film. What was he doing here? Slow down, I hate this climb.”"He was passing through. What else? He drops in, he passes through. That's the way Volterra operates.”"True enough.”"He'd been in Turkey. He thought he'd drop in. Brought along his current lady. She kept saying, 'People with cancer always want to kiss me on the mouth.' Where does he find them?”"Too bad. I'd like to have seen him. He was coming here, I was going there.”"You're claiming foreknowledge. You knew I was going to say something about him.”"The old psychic motor is still running. When I saw you in the shirt I thought of him right away. Then Tap walked on ahead in his half-downcast all-knowing manner. You started to say something and it hit me: she's heard from Frank. How did he know you were here?”"I wrote once or twice.”"So he knew we'd separated.”"He knew.”"Do you think that's why he dropped in?”"Ass.”"How is he? Does he still sit with his back to the wall in restaurants?”A man and his small sons were mending a net. Kathryn stopped to exchange greetings in the set manner, the simple questions that brought such satisfying replies, the ceremony of well-being. I stepped between the gathers of yellow mesh and with an effort caught up to Tap.