The Names

We found a room above a grocery store in a beaten seaside town with a rubble beach, cliffs dropping sheer to the sea. I was glad to be there. We sat each to a bed in the darkish room, attempting to put ourselves at a mental distance from the rocking car, the lurches and turns of the day. It took a while to believe we were off that last flooded track.The old grocer and his wife invited us down to dinner. The simple room at the back of the store had a beamed ceiling and oil lamp and carved box for linens and these made for a certain order and warmth, a comfort of the spirit after all that stone. The old man knew some German and used it whenever he sensed I wasn't following what he said. From time to time I reported his remarks to Tap, mainly inventing as I went along. It seemed to satisfy them both.The woman had white hair and clear blue eyes. Pictures of her children and grandchildren were set around a mirror. They were all in Athens or Patras except for one son, buried nearby.After dinner we watched television for half an hour. A man with a pointer stood before a map, explaining the weather. Tap thought this was very funny. The scene was familiar to him, of course. The map, the graphics, the talking-gesturing man. But this man spoke a language other than English. And this was funny, it upset his expectations, to hear these queer words in a familiar setting, as if the weather itself had gone berserk. The grocer and his wife joined in the laughter. We all did. Possibly, to Tap, the strange language exposed the whole idea as gibberish, the idea of forecasts, the idea of talking before a camera about the weather. It had been gibberish in English as well. But he hadn't realized it until now.We sat in the blue glow, laughing.

What do you know about them?They weren't Greek.How do you know that?You see it right away. Faces, clothes, mannerisms. It's just there. A set of things. A history. Foreigners practically glow in certain local landscapes. You know at once.How many were there?A crowded table. But the tables in that place are small. I'd say four people. At least one was a woman. In the brief time I was in there, the glancing look I had, the animal feel of them, I think I sensed a guardedness, a suspicion. It's possible I'm supplying this impression after the fact but I don't think so. It was there. I didn't pick it up fully at the time. I was intent on other things. I didn't know it might mean something.What language did they speak?I don't know. I heard the voices as a tone, only, an undercurrent in the room. I was intent on asking my questions about hotels and maps.Was it English, possibly?No. Not English. I would have recognized English just from the tone, the particular quality of the noise.What did they look like, a general impression?They looked like people who came from nowhere. They'd escaped all the usual associations. They weren't Greek but what were they? In a sense they belonged to that worn-out café as much as any local idler does. They were in no hurry, I don't think, to find another place to sit, another place to live. They were people who found almost any place as good as almost any other. They didn't make distinctions.All this in a glance, a walk across the room?The feeling you get. I couldn't pick them out of a crowd of similar people, I don't know what they look like as individuals, but the general recognition, the awareness of some collective identity-yes, it's there at a glance.What were they wearing?I recall an old wasted aviator jacket on one man. Outer material peeling off. A hat, definitely. Someone wore a hat, a knitted skullcap, several dark colors, a circular pattern. I think the woman had a scarf and boots. I may have seen the boots when we drove past the café on our way out of town. Floor-to-ceiling windows.What else?Just an impression of old clothes, mixed things, some touches of brightness maybe, a sense of layers, whatever they could add on to keep warm.What else? Nothing.

In the morning, a couple of minutes out of town, I saw a dark shape come out of the scrub near the road, an instant with a speed and weight to it, something near the right front wheel, and I hit it, a dull sound trailing off behind us, and kept driving."What was it?”"A dog," he said."I saw it too late. It ran right into us.”He said nothing."Do you want to go back?”"What's the point?" he said."Maybe it's not dead. We can find somewhere to take it.”"Where could we take it? What's the point? Let's keep driving. I want to drive. That's all.”The rain was a torrent now and people started coming out of the fields, people I hadn't known were there, mostly the old and very young, shrouded in coats and shawls, riding donkeys, walking head down, leaving on tractors, whole families on tractors with umbrellas and blankets and plastic sheeting held over them as they crowded between the massive tires, moving slowly toward home.