The Names

Owen Brademas came up out of the dark, striding, his shoulders set forward against the steep grade. He carried a bottle of wine, holding it aloft when he saw me at the window. Kathryn and I went out and watched him take the stairs two at a time.I had an insight. He is a man who takes stairs two at a time. What this explained I'd no idea.They spent a moment together in the kitchen talking about the dig. I opened the wine, put a match to the candles and then we sat drinking in the wind-stirred light."They're gone. They're definitely gone. I was there. They left garbage, odds and ends.”"When was the old man killed?" I said."I don't know that, James. I've never even been to that village. I have no privileged information. Just what people say.”"He was dead twenty-four hours when they found him," Kath-ryn said. "That's the estimate. Someone came from Syros. Prefect of police, I think he's called, and a coroner apparently. He wasn't a farmer, he wasn't a shepherd.”"When did they leave, Owen?”"I don't know that. I went there only to talk. Out of curiosity. I have no special information.”"Senseless killing.”"A feeble-minded old man," I said. "How did he get across the island?”"He could have walked," she said. "It's what the people in the restaurant think. There's a way to do it on foot if you know the paths. It's barely possible. The theory is he wandered off. Got lost. Ended up there. He often wandered.”"That far?”"I don't know.”"What do you think, Owen?”"I saw them only that one time. I went back because they'd seemed so interested in what I told them. There didn't seem to be a danger in going and I wanted to get more out of them if I could. Obviously they were determined to speak Greek, which was a drawback but not a crucial one. The fact is they probably had no intention of telling me who they are and what they were doing there, in any language.”But there was something he wanted to tell them. An odd fact, a remnant. He thought they'd be interested in this, being zealots of the alphabet or whatever they were, and he hadn't thought of mentioning it the first time they talked.When he went to Qasr Hallabat to see the inscriptions, he'd taken the Zarqa-Azraq road, traveling north from Amman, veering east into the desert. The fortress was in ruins, of course, with cut basalt blocks strewn everywhere. Latin, Greek, Nabatean inscriptions. The order of the Greek stones was totally upset. Even the blocks still standing were out of place, upside down, plastered over. All this done by the Umayyads, who used the stones without regard for the writing on them. They were rebuilding the previous structure, the Byzantine, which had been built from the Roman, and so on, and they wanted building blocks, not edicts carved in Greek.All right. A lovely place to wander around in, full of surprises, a massive crossword for someone in the Department of Antiquities. And all of this, the castle, the stones, the inscriptions, is situated midway between Zarqa and Azraq. To Owen, to someone with Owen's bent for spotting such things, these names are seen at once to be anagrams. This is what he wanted to tell the people in the hills. How strange, he wanted to say, that the place he was looking for, this evocative botched ruin, lay between perfect twin pillars-place-names with the same set of letters, rearranged. And it was precisely a rearrangement, a reordering, that was in progress at Qasr Hallabat. Archaeologists and workmen attempting to match the inscribed blocks.The mind's little infinite, he called all this.I went inside for fruit. With the bowl in my hand I stopped at the door to Tap's room and looked in. He lay with his head turned toward me, wetting his lips in his sleep, a sound like a fussy kiss. I glanced down at the papers on his makeshift writing table, a board jammed into an alcove, but it was too dark to read the painstaking loops and slants.Outside we talked awhile about his writing. It turned out Owen had learned a few days ago that his own early years were the subject matter. He didn't know whether to be pleased or upset."There are many better topics he could find. But I'm happy to learn I've kindled an interest. I'm not sure I want to read the result, however.”"Why not?" I said.He paused to think about this."Don't forget," Kathryn said, "this is fiction we're talking about, even if the nonfiction kind. Real people, made-up remarks. The boy has a fix on the modern mind. Let's show him a little more respect.”"But you said he changed my name.”"I made him.”"If I were a writer," Owen said, "how I would enjoy being told the novel is dead. How liberating, to work in the margins, outside a central perception. You are the ghoul of literature. Lovely.”"Have you ever written?" she said."Never. I used to think it would be grand to be a poet. I was very young, this was long ago, I'm sure I thought a poet was a delicate pale fellow with a low-grade fever.”"Were you a delicate pale fellow?”"Awkward, maybe, but strong, or strong enough. In the tall-grass prairie what you did was work. All that space. I think we plowed and swung the pick and the brush scythe to keep from being engulfed by space. It was like living in the sky. I didn't know how awesome it was until I went away. It grows more awesome all the time, the memory.”"But you've taught in the Midwest and West.”"Different places.”"Not Kansas?”"Not the prairie. There isn't much left. I haven't been home in thirty-five years.”"And you never wrote a poem, Owen? Tell the truth," she said, playing lightly at something."I was a plodder, kind of slow, I think, one of those gawky boys who stands around squinting into the glare. I worked, I did chores, a dutiful son, unhappy. But I don't think I so much as scribbled a single line of poetry, Kathryn, not one.”The flames went flat, shot down, unstable in the wind. The trembling light seemed to wish an urgency on us. I was taking wine in half-glass bursts, getting drier all the time. The others rambled calmly toward midnight."Solitude.”"We lived in town for a time. Then outside, a lonely place, barely a place at all.”"I was never alone," she said. "When my mother died I think my father made a point of filling the house with people. It was like one of those old stage comedies in which the main characters are about to set sail for Europe. The set is full of luggage. Friends and well-wishers keep showing up. Complications develop.”"We were in the middle. Everything was around us, somehow equidistant. Everything was space, extremes of weather.”"We kept moving. My father kept buying houses. We'd live in a house for a while and then he'd buy another. Sometimes he got around to selling the old one, sometimes he didn't. He never learned how to be wealthy. People might despise a man for that but everyone liked him. His house-buying was anything but ostentatious. There was a deep restlessness in him, an insecurity. He was like someone trying to slip away in the night. Loneliness was a disease he seemed to think had been lying in wait for him all along. Everyone liked him. I think this worried him somehow. Made sad by friendship. He must have had a low opinion of himself.”"Then I was a man. In fact I was forty. I realized I saw the age of forty from a child's viewpoint.”"I know the feeling," I said. "Forty was my father's age. All fathers were forty. I keep fighting the idea I'm fast approaching his age. As an adult I've only been two ages. Twenty-two and forty. I was twenty-two well into my thirties. Now I've begun to be forty, two years shy of the actual fact. In ten years I'll still be forty.”"At your age I began to feel my father present in me. There were unreal moments.”"You felt he was occupying you. I know. Suddenly he's there. You even feel you look like him.”"Brief moments. I felt I'd become my father. He took me over, he filled me.”"You step into an elevator, suddenly you're him. The door closes, the feeling's gone. But now you know who he was.”"Tomorrow we do mothers," Kathryn said. "Except count me out. I barely remember mine.”"Your mother's death is what did it to him," I said.She looked at me."How could you know that? Did he talk to you about it?”"No.”"Then how could you know that?”I took a long time filling the glasses and composed my voice to sound a new theme."Why is it we talk so much here? I do the same in Athens. Inconceivable, all this conversation, in North America. Talking, listening to others talk. Keller threw me out at six-thirty the other morning. It must be life outdoors. Something in the air.”"You're half smashed all the time. That's one possibility.”"We talk more, drunk or sober," I said. "The air is filled with words.”He looked past us, firmly fixed, a lunar sadness. I wondered what he saw out there. His hands were clasped on his chest, large hands, nicked and scarred, a digger and rock gouger, a plowboy once. Kathryn's eyes met mine. Her compassion for the man was possibly large enough to allow some drippings for the husband in his supplication. Merciful bountiful sex. The small plain bed in the room at the end of the hotel corridor, sheets drawn tight. That too might be a grace and favor of the island, a temporary lifting of the past."I think they're on the mainland," Owen said.How could you understand, he seemed to be asking. Your domestic drama, your tepid idiom of reproach and injury. These ranks of innocent couples with their marriage wounds. He kept looking past us."They said something about the Peloponnese. It wasn't entirely clear. One of them seemed to know a place there, somewhere they might stay.”Kathryn said, "Is this something the police ought to be told?”"I don't know. Is it?" The movement of his hand toward the wine glass brought him back. "Lately I've been thinking of Rawlinson, the Englishman who wanted to copy the inscriptions on the Behistun rock. The languages were Old Persian, Elamite and Babylonian. Maneuvering on ladders from the first group to the second, he nearly fell to his death. This inspired him to use a Kurdish boy to copy the Babylonian set, which was the least accessible. The boy inched across a rock mass that had only the faintest indentations he might use for finger-grips. Fingers and toes. Maybe he used the letters themselves. I'd like to believe so. This is how he proceeded, clinging to the rock, passing below the great bas-relief of Darius facing a group of rebels in chains. A sheer drop. But he made it, miraculously, according to Rawlinson, and was eventually able to do a paper cast of the text, swinging from a sort of bosun's chair. What kind of story is this and why have I been thinking about it lately?”"It's a political allegory," Kathryn said."Is that what it is? I think it's a story about how far men will go to satisfy a pattern, or find a pattern, or fit together the elements of a pattern. Rawlinson wanted to decipher cuneiform writing. He needed these three examples of it. When the Kurdish boy swung safely back over the rock, it was the beginning of the Englishman's attempt to discover a great secret. All the noise and babble and spit of three spoken languages had been subdued and codified, broken down to these wedge-shaped marks. With his grids and lists the decipherer searches out relationships, parallel structures. What are the sign frequencies, the phonetic values? He wants a design that will make this array of characters speak to him. After Rawlinson came Norris. It's interesting, Kathryn, that both these men were at one time employed by the East India Company. A different pattern here, again one age speaks to another. We can say of the Persians that they were enlightened conquerors, at least in this instance. They preserved the language of the subjugated people. This same Elamite language was one of those deciphered by the political agents and interpreters of the East India Company. Is this the scientific face of imperialism? The humane face?”"Subdue and codify," Kathryn said. "How many times have we seen it?”"If it's a story about how far men will go," he said, "why have I been thinking about it? Maybe it bears on the murder of that old man. If your suspicions about the cult are well-founded, and if they are a cult, I can tell you it probably wasn't a senseless killing, Kathryn. It wasn't casual. They didn't do it for thrills.”"You saw them and talked to them.”"That's my judgment. I could be wrong. We could all be wrong.”I looked ahead to the walls of my hotel room. Standing by the bed in my pajamas. I always felt silly in pajamas. The name of the hotel was Kouros, like the village, the island, the ship that provided passage to and from the island. Singly knit. The journey that shares the edges of destinations. Mikro Kamini, where the old man was found, means small furnace or kiln. I always felt a surge of childlike pride, knowing such things or figuring them out, even when a dead body was the occasion for my efforts. The first fragment of Greek I ever translated was a wall slogan in the middle of Athens. Death to Fascists. Once it took me nearly an hour, with a dictionary and book of grammar, to translate the directions on a box of Quaker Oats. Dick and Dot had to tell me where to buy cereal with multilingual instructions on the box."I have a feeling about night," Owen said. "The things of the world are no longer discrete. All the day's layers and distinctions fade in the dark. Night is continuous.”"It doesn't matter whether we lie or tell the truth," Kathryn said."Wonderful, yes, exactly.”Standing by the bed in my pajamas. Kathryn reading. How many nights, in our languid skin, disinclined toward talk or love, the dense hours behind us, we shared this moment, not knowing it was matter to share. It appeared to be nothing, bedtime once more, her pillowed head in fifty watts, except that these particulars, man standing, pages turning, the details repeated almost nightly, began to take on mysterious force. Here I am again, standing by the bed in my pajamas, acting out a memory. It was a memory that didn't exist independently. I recalled the moment only when I was repeating it. The mystery built around this fact, I think, that act and recollection were one. A moment of autobiography, a minimal frieze. The moment referred back to itself at the same time as it pointed forward. Here I am. A curious reminder that I was going to die. It was the only time in my marriage that I felt old, a specimen of oldness, a landmark, standing in those slightly oversized pajamas, a little ridiculous, reliving the same moment of the night before, Kathryn reading in bed, a dram of Greek brandy on the bedside table, another reference forward. I will die alone. Old, geologically. The lower relief of landforms. Olduvai.Who knows what this means? The force of the moment was in what I didn't know about it, standing there, the night tides returning, the mortal gleanings that filled the space between us, untellably, our bodies arranged for dreaming in loose-fitting clothes.Living alone I never felt it. Somehow the reference depended on the woman in the bed. Or maybe it's just that my days and nights had become less routine. Travel, hotels. The surroundings changed too often.