An awkwardness settled over them. Myles wasn’t happy to see Paul. He didn’t like scenes or people hurt for sport. But now Paul was all charm, mangling a little Greek to put Yórgos at ease. Myles stayed longer than he meant to—the black bread was cooling on a shelf in the window when he got to the bakery.
Standing at the counter, paying for the bread, Myles listened to the music filtering in from a back room. The sound was scratchy, a record maybe. But it was the real thing, Greek music, old time bazouki, the sound of Asia in it. Asia Minor, Myles thought, so close, not even there, really, but here.
Eleven
16 June
Anne looked at the box of salt fish by the door and shuddered. It smelled bad but it smelled, and she liked that, anyway. The air in the little store was thick with the smell of olives and coffee, spices in newspaper cones and braids of garlic hung on nails on both sides of the doorjamb. The simple density of the smells reminded her of the Pike Place Market of her childhood, where she’d gone with her family to buy spiced tea and dates and powdered vanilla by the ounce. This was nothing like shopping at Fred Meyer where she shopped at home, a store that hardly smelled at all.
She carried her basket around the pell-mell aisles, trying to find in the jumble the few things she’d forgotten when she’d bought for her room: something to juice oranges, a serrated knife, stick matches and mosquito coils. The store was busy and she waited with fitful impatience in the checkout line, a line of tourists buying snacks or suntan oil or fruit from the produce baskets that lined the curb outside the store. She listened to the girl at the register, her friendly if broken English punctuated by swift, clacking Greek.
The light shone thick in the store window, but only half-lit the dusky shop. Anne stood there, still, feeling the world rush around her. The couple in front of her, she realized, was upset; the man put down their basket on the counter and mouthed, “Okay!” They were looking out the window at three girls, beautiful gawky girls, who were smiling furiously at an animated man who was laughing, holding out a peach to the oldest of the three. She had taken a bite and a drop of juice had run down to her chin, which he was wiping away with a finger that somehow lingered suggestively near her throat.
“Larry! Do something!”
Larry called out, “Hey!” And, pushed a little, started for the door.
The girls looked startled, caught out, but turned toward their father obediently.
The man with the peach licked his finger and then half-turned to look, too. It was Paul, smiling still, as if he was the only one of them more than half alive. “Ciao,” he called out to the girls’ backs.
Anne stepped behind their mother. Over Larry’s shoulder she could just see the insolence in the look Paul turned on him.
“Daddy?” Paul asked, head cocked, then strode away.
“Miss?” Anne looked around, the family of girls was gone. The cashier took her basket with one hand, gesturing toward where Paul had gone with the other. “That man,” she said, “he is like honey.”
Out in the cobbled alley, Anne’s first impulse was to go now, after Paul, but that impulse was weak, and she turned toward the harbor. “So,” she thought, “he still has it.” She stared at the sack in her hand as if she couldn’t figure out how it had gotten there. She felt impaired, frozen. She needed to sit down in the sun.
Later, curled on her bed in her shaded room, she cried. She remembered deep as her bones that she was grown from a little girl who had often cried alone, nobody to tell.
Twelve
14 Sept.
Yesterday I hiked the trail straight down, into the caldera. Or what I took for a trail; I soon lost it in a maze of overgrown terraces and goat paths. The descent is abrupt, a foot down for every foot forward, but broken by terraces sometimes higher than they are wide. Not built by anybody planning to leave them behind. The terraces are so thick in olives, figs, and thorns that once I got off the lip of the caldera the floor of the crater below was rarely visible. Untended. Maybe not the people who built them, but somebody sure as hell left them behind. Fleeing from or running to, it’s come to seem to me that it hardly matters which. You arrive at a place you don’t understand and won’t understand ever as the locals do. It’s less constructed—for you—than the place you left, less encumbered. The rocks themselves seem less encumbered, as if gravity had given way; everything wants to float up. Only what it is, the new place shines, as if eternal. And for you it is. It has no history, no future, it’s only there for you as you walk by it, forever just so. If you keep on walking.
A camera works a similar magic. There’s more to the link between photography and travel than just having an album of snaps to show the boys back home, the proof. Photos rise up out of reality, things forever fixed. The photograph may yellow or rot, but the world within it lies in a dumb trance from which there is no waking. That moment and eternity pull together. And yet, tourists arrange their photos in albums, in stories, and read their guidebooks, “for context,” “the historical context,” to keep creeping eternity from dissolving their stories altogether, into a kind of rapture. They guard carefully against the very thing that called to them, set them traveling to begin with. But not me, no not me, I wanted the rapture, I wanted it bad.
When I broke out of the brush, the path was clearly a path and led directly to a road. Soon I was walking on blacktop, striding along, and the floor of the crater came up on the left, flat and barren and the smell of sulfur very loud. I stepped off the blacktop and suddenly wherever I walked there was a path. The place was riddled with paths, and I kept on, heading for the crater within the crater, the very throat of the volcano. I walked right down into it. Sulfur. Dust. The heat, the smell nearly dropped me.
I walked in the silence of the crater, walked home in a silence so deep I could hardly wade through it. The crows took a friendly interest in my progress, watching to see if I’d make it. Heat waves. A watery mirage always receding before me. I stayed on the blacktop the whole way, the long way, but free of briars. When I got back here I took a small, round watermelon up on the roof, a knife and a spoon, and ate the entire thing looking down into the volcano. I watched the early shadows push out from the crater walls in the west and spread like a tide across the floor, then climb the eastern walls, until they pushed the last of the light off the lip and up into the sky. The sky got orange and color spread back, and then all that was left of the sun’s light succumbed in the west. A few small lights flickered to life in Emborió, and across the crater, in Nikiá, quite a few more. The way a day ends. I carried a mattress up onto the roof and a couple of blankets, lit a mosquito coil, and settled in to watch the stars wheel westward.
Thirteen
17 June
Myles got off the Vespa at the foot of the Katarráktes, the less trafficked steps between Yialós and Chorió. The summer before, it had taken him some poking around to find where the steps started up, though the ascending ramp of the stairs is visible from most of town. Unlike the Kalí Stráta, the Katarráktes is not closed in by houses, but angles up a hillside out in the open. Myles rarely saw a tourist there; the stairs led to a quiet neighborhood of modest houses and if there were tavernas or bars or anything else a tourist was likely to walk to up there, Myles had never seen them. Of course, there were a few dedicated walkers, and occasionally Myles met one of them coming down as he was going up. But they tended to be good sorts and Myles didn’t mind seeing them there. He walked up the Katarráktes often, preferring to make a loop rather than take the Kalí Stráta coming and going. Besides, the walk across Chorió, high on the hill over the harbor, was one of his favorites, and he made it often with camera in hand. He loved the startling views