The Names

The body was found at the edge of a village called Mikro Kamini, an old man, bludgeoned. This village lies about three miles inland, among terraced fields that soon give out before the empty hills and the massive groupings farther in, the pillars and castellated rock forms. The landscape begins to acquire a formal power at Mikro Kamini. There's suggestion of willful distance from the sea, willful isolation, and the fields and groves abruptly end nearby. Here the island becomes the bare Cycladic rock seen from the decks of passing ships, a place of worked-out quarries, goat-bells, insane winds. The villages nestled on the coast seem not so much a refuge for seagoing men nor a series of maze structures contrived to discourage entrance by force, make a laborious business of marauding; from here they are detailed reliefs or cameos, wishing not to attract the attention of whatever forces haunt the interior. The streets that bend back on themselves or disappear, the miniature churches and narrow lanes, these seem a form of self-effacement, a way of saying there is nothing here worth bothering about. They are a huddling, a gathering together against the stark landforms and volcanic rock. Superstition, vendetta, incest. The things that visit the spirit in the solitary hills. Bestiality and murder. The whitewashed coastal villages are talismans against these things, formulaic designs.The fear of sea and things that come from the sea is easily spoken. The other fear is different, hard to name, the fear of things at one's back, the silent inland presence.At the house we sat in the slanted living room in low cane chairs. Kathryn made tea."I talked to people at the restaurant. A hammer, they said.”"You'd think a gun. Land disputes between farmers. A shotgun or rifle.”"He wasn't a farmer," she said, "and he wasn't from that village. He lived in a house across the island. He was apparently feeble-minded. He lived with a married niece and her children.”"Tap and I went through there my first visit. I took Owen's motor scooter, remember? You gave us hell.”"Senseless killings are supposed to happen in the New York subways. I've been edgy all day.”"Where are those people from the cave?”"I've been thinking about them too. Owen says they've gone.”"Where is Owen?”"At the site.”"Swimming above the sunken ruins. That's my image of him. An aging dolphin.”"The conservator came back today," she said. "He'd gone off to Crete with someone.”"What does he do?”"Preserves the finds. Puts the pieces together.”"What are the finds?" I said."Look, this work is important. I know what you think. I'm feeding some fanatical impulse.”"Does Owen think it's important?”"Owen's in another world. He's left this one behind. That doesn't mean it's futile work. We find objects. They tell us something. All right, there's no more money for things. No more photographers, no geologists, no draftsmen. But we find objects, we come upon features. This dig wâS designed partly as a field school. Help students learn. And we are learning, those who've stayed.”"What happens next?”"Why does something have to happen next?”"My friends the Maitlands have entertaining arguments. I wish we could learn that skill. They don't waver from an even tone. It's taken me all this time to realize they've been arguing since I've known them. It's an undercurrent. They've made a highly developed skill of it.”"Nobody just digs," she said.Church bells, shuttered windows. She looked at me through the partial darkness, studying something she hadn't seen, possibly, in a long time. I wanted to provoke, make her question herself. Tap came in with a friend, Rajiv, the son of the assistant field director, and there were noises of greeting. The boys wanted to show me something outside and when I turned in the doorway, going out, she was pouring a second cup, leaning toward the bench where the tea things were, and I hoped this wasn't the moment when we became ourselves again. The island's small favors and immunities could not have run out so soon. Bringing something new into being. After the bright shock fades, after the separation, there's the deeper age, the gradual language of love and acceptance, at least in theory, in folklore. The Greek rite. How fitting that she had a male child, someone to love fiercely.The bells stopped ringing. Tap and Rajiv took me along a path near the top of the village. The cut-paper brightness of doors and flowers. The curtains lifted in the wind. They showed me a three-legged dog and waited for my reaction. A shapeless old woman in black, with a red clay face, a black head-scarf, sat outside a house below us, shelling peas. The air settled into an agitated silence. I told them every village has its three-legged dog.