Everything Beautiful Began After Part 3

EIGHT MONTHS, TWO WEEKS,.

THREE DAYS, AND FOURTEEN HOURS.

EVERY MOMENT WITH HIM.

WAS OUR HEAVEN ON EARTH.

George wondered if one day, somebody might count the minutes of his life.

Sometimes he stole a small carton of chocolate milk from the cafeteria and poured some into the ground for Tom.

Some of the flat tombstones had been split by weather. On another, time had erased whole sections of lettering. One gravestone was completely blank. George imagined it was his.

In summer, he lay in the dry gra.s.s without moving. The sun on his face like the hot cheek of a lover. His eyes closed to a glowing curtain of warm blood.

He wondered what his father was doing and blamed himself for his father's departure when he was seven years old. He felt bonded to his mother by deficiency. Somehow, in a way he couldn't understand, they had all failed as a family.

George once considered that his father was dead, and that his secret life overseas was a cover-up because George was somehow responsible for his death in a way he couldn't remember. But the reality was probably that his father was happier without them, and if he had a son in Saudi Arabia where his oil company was based, then he was probably more intelligent, more handsome, and a bit taller than George. The truth about his father would have to wait until he showed up several years later.

George decided on Athens long before he actually went. It was a city he felt he knew intimately through the many texts he had translated.

As he neared graduation from Exmouth, George told his mother in a letter home how he planned to do his college degree in two years and then move to Athens to embark upon life as an archaeological linguist. George argued that archaeologists help modern cultures through what they expose with their excavations. He gave examples. Israel's unwelcoming Negev Desert-a place where archaeologists uncovered the method by which the ancient Nabataean people had irrigated the land for crops two thousand years ago using the rain from cloudbursts through a system of irrigation channels and water cisterns. After this technology was relearned, life quickly returned to a place modern residents had found was beyond any type of cultivation.

Even more miraculous, George wrote in another letter, was how-after years of failed agricultural efforts four thousand meters up, in a lake region of Peru and Bolivia-archaeologists uncovered a technique that ancients had used to grow crops successfully on about two hundred thousand acres.

In the few letters his mother wrote back, she never once mentioned any of his historical stories. Instead she told him what she had eaten for breakfast, how the weather had ruined her plans, the state of the house, their lack of money, and that she dreaded her birthday. Once she said she was having minor surgery, and would be unable to write for three months and not to worry about her.

Between Exmouth and Athens, George went to a small liberal arts college, not far from his school. He lived in the dormitory known as Foxhole. He had a bed, a desk, a chair, a lamp, and a small bookshelf, which was stacked precariously with too many volumes.

He had a roommate from an island off Maine called Joshua, who wore a clear brace over his teeth and rode a 1950s bicycle.

On Sat.u.r.day nights, George copied out whole sections of the Iliad and the Odyssey in ancient Greek. After his first English cla.s.s, George gave the teacher a folder containing a few of his translations. The teacher was very old. He opened the folder, looked perplexed for a moment, and then said, "Jesus of Nazareth."

During his freshman year, he stayed up for two days, listening to the Bach part.i.tas over and over without headphones.

A week later George returned to his dorm to find his roommate's cupboard empty and his bed stripped to a mattress. A note on George's pillow said: Dear George, I've moved! But only a few doors down the hall if you ever need a friend . . .

Joshua B George wrapped CDs of Bach's French Suites into a little package with ribbon. Then he opened a bottle of gin and swigged from it several times before pouring some into a gla.s.s and mixing it with tonic water.

Then he took out a pad of paper and a pen.

He looked at his drink and then out the window-at the gently blowing tall trees that were all over campus. Then George carried the package down the hall and left it outside Joshua's new door with a note that read: When Johann Sebastian Bach was nine years old, he copied out an entire library of music. He sneaked out of his bedroom, went downstairs, quietly turned the metal circle that lifted the latch and worked quickly in a blaze of moonlight. The pa.s.sions we cannot control are the ones that define us.

G.

A few nights after making love to Rebecca, George relived the experience in a cafe close to his apartment. He tried to remember every detail, things she said, what they had for dinner. He wanted a photograph of her or a lock of hair, some physical token to remind him of the night-something he could actually hold in his hand as proof that he'd finally done it, and was in love.

Chapter Six.

The next day was Sunday. Rebecca woke up and took a shower. Then she tidied her studio. When everything was put away, she felt like going out and decided to visit the narrow lanes of the Monastiraki flea market. She picked out a pair of plain white pants, but nothing so tight as to have Monastiraki's thin-haired vendors barking at her to come over. She had outgrown the need to be admired by men she was not interested in.

The flea market attracted many different groups of people. The low working cla.s.s who looked for things they could sell for a small profit. Bohemians (usually foreign) fascinated by the plethora of random objects and the cultural diaspora responsible for things like former Soviet Union military-issue binoculars (with a hammer and sickle hologram in the gla.s.s). Then there was the criminal element, who were omnipresent at most outdoor, public events in Athens, and who seemed interested only in looking about the crowd, as though picking out specific faces for their vicious fantasies.

For Rebecca, the most important member of the flea market community was the laturna man, a decrepit organ grinder with a music box on wheels from the 1850s. He would wheel his cart from corner to corner, stop, turn the organ wheel, and then sing. His voice was old and cracked, like the record embedded in his machine. To Rebecca, he was like some mythical figure from another time. And she found him beautiful without understanding anything that he said.

The heat on the Athens metro was dangerous. Old women fanned themselves with rolled-up newspapers. The seats were wooden and pa.s.sengers faced one another across tables, as though seated for a meal that would never come.

She had eaten two croissants for breakfast, warmed on her patio in the sun. Then, barefoot, she drank ice-cold goat's milk from a bowl, watching cars swerve around a dead dog.

She climbed the steps from the metro station to ground level past two grimy teenagers injecting heroin. Monastiraki was packed-mostly tourists who'd spilled over from the Plaka. There were also scores of pickpockets trailing American and German tourists who had strayed from their tour groups.

The alleys of Monastiraki were dark and hot. Vendors hung merchandise from every possible corner of the street. Small alleys led to stairs that opened upon rooms of French tableware, porcelain dolls, family photographs, a silver headlamp quietly unscrewed from a Rolls Royce Silver Ghost parked at the base of the Acropolis in 1937. There were other things too, with a more sinister past. One vendor had a stack of n.a.z.i soldiers' helmets with the letters SS painted on the side in gothic script, n.a.z.i silverware, mugs of random bullets, knives, handcuffs, and old mouse traps rusted shut.

You could buy 1930s medical instruments, a collection of playing cards from hotels in the south of France, surgical masks, Venetian masks, and monogrammed b.u.t.ter knives.

Her eyes drifted over the mountains of junk that lay on blankets next to refugee women with scarves tied over their heads. Everyone was coated in sweat. And in some corners, stringy meat cooked on small gas burners.

Then a face in the crowd stood out to her. A man with black hair and dark eyes, unshaven. Rebecca strained to see with the vague feeling that she knew this man.

Breathless, she squatted to find a s.p.a.ce in the crowd through which to view him better. A woman yelled at her in Russian, suspecting a thief. Rebecca stood and walked away briskly.

An hour later, perusing the many things for sale (but still in the fury of her experience), Rebecca spotted a rare book with a paper cover.

As she reached down instinctively to pluck it from a twisted ball of tattered clothes, another hand clasped the top of the spine. Without letting go, Rebecca looked up and saw the face of the man holding the book. It was the severe handsomeness her grandfather had once possessed. The dark eyes held her in place. He smiled, and would not let go.

She released the book and stood up. The man stared at her, holding the book.

"But I saw it first," Rebecca said impulsively.

"How do you know I haven't already paid for it?" the man said calmly.

Rebecca tried to make eye contact with the refugee woman selling the book, but she was busy shaking her fists at a small boy urinating on the wall behind her.

He opened the book and she watched. It was a first edition Colette with uncut paper. But the second half of the book was blank. He handed it to her.

"It's like they forgot to print the second half," she said.

The refugee woman wanted a few pennies for the book. The man gave her ten British pounds.

"Show-off," Rebecca said.

"Karma," he said, and then without officially agreeing to, they walked from Monastiraki to the Ancient Agora, inadvertently brus.h.i.+ng hands as they threaded their way through the crowds and ancient lanes.

He stopped walking to introduce himself as Henry, and when Rebecca gave her name, he said it several times, as though it were a new taste in his mouth.

"These are the same streets Plato walked down," Henry said, after telling Rebecca a little about his work as an archaeologist specializing in human remains.

"Plato was after Socrates but before Aristotle?" she said.

"They all had great beards."

"Beards?" she asked, smiling.

"Like Santa Claus or Pere Noel in French."

"What did he say?" Rebecca asked.

"Well, let me see, wasn't it 'Ho-ho-ho'?"

She laughed. "I mean what did Socrates write about?"

"I don't really know," Henry said.

"Yes, you do," she said.

"Okay, he didn't write, he just talked."

"Like us," she said.

At the gateway to the Ancient Agora, bony dogs lounged in a pile. Flies...o...b..ted their heads.

"This is the old marketplace," Henry said, "where Zeno came up with a few of his lines."

"I see," Rebecca said. She had no idea who Zeno was, but imagined a masked man with a sword in fis.h.i.+ng waders. Then Henry stopped walking and recited something to a slumped dog under a bush.

"Every man has perfect freedom, provided he emanc.i.p.ates himself from mundane desires."

The dog sat up and began to pant.

Rebecca smiled. "He wants something to drink."

The Ancient Agora spread out before them as patches of half-collapsed marble.

Each mound was roped off. The paths were dusty and yellow. Patches of weeds had grown around the monuments obscuring each base. A few tourists milled slowly about, unsure of whether to go on or return to their hotels and lie down.

Lovers, too, dotted the shadier benches below the olive branches, more interested in each other than the ruins that lay around them.

Then Rebecca did something uncharacteristic.

When Henry took her hand and led her through the marketplace, she not only let him take it-but held on. He was certainly handsome, but for her it was more, as though in every movement, in every word and gesture she found herself thrilled-as though a spell had been cast and his mere presence filled her with an unimaginable happiness that was without reason or condition.

Henry explained the significance of each eruption of rubble. He talked a little more about his work, and the various bones he had personally uncovered.

They walked up and down the Panathenaic Way-Athens' ancient main street.

Henry described the statues as though they were part of his family.

Rebecca noted how the ruins looked chewed, as if by giant mouths. Henry said that most of the original structures had been torn apart by religious fanatics, war, or the most effective method of destruction, neglect.

They sat down in the only shady spot-at the Stoa of Attalos, a long covered porch of marble that led to a museum. Rebecca removed her sandals and lay her feet on the cool stone. On a podium next to them was one of the small fragments upon which the entire reconstruction had been modeled. A few original steps remained, worn into deep smiles by centuries of coming and going. People who pa.s.sed behind them were visible only as shadows. Henry explained how the statues before them had been judged not good enough for major museums, but too interesting to sell privately.

Rebecca thought that this endowed them with a realistic sense of beauty. But she didn't say it. She let her eyes roll over the sumptuous torsi of Odysseus and then Achilles. But then she decided to say something. After all, she was a painter living in Athens, no longer a poor girl from a French village whose mother wanted nothing to do with her.

"I like these so much," she said, pointing out the figures before them.

"Why?" Henry seemed interested.

"Because they are imperfect."

"That makes them special?"

"It makes them more realistic."

Henry stared at them.

"I like what you're saying," he said. "It's something I would never have thought of."

Rebecca knew little of cla.s.sical art. Her education had consisted of pragmatic middle-aged teachers reading loudly from books, gray gaping cla.s.srooms, windows that tilted to open. In the distance, windy fields in varying degrees of brown, a long walk to school, her tights always itching, her belly still hot from breakfast, a tractor moving slowly across the field towing birds like tiny kites.

Rebecca moved her feet because they were going to sleep.

Henry was talking, but in her mind, she saw only the hand of her old teacher writing something on the board.