The Names

I joined David, running in the woods. Rains had turned the high grass solid green. We ran along paths on different levels of the hill, moving in and out of sight of each other. His bright clothes flashed through the spindly pines.Mrs. Helen was patient with my attempts to conjugate difficult verbs. She lectured on the niceties of pronunciation and stress, the correctness of this or that form in a given situation. We sat with our cups of tea, our embossed paper napkins. It seemed to me that the language as she taught it existed mainly as a medium of politeness between people, with odd allowances made for the communication of ideas and feelings. We ate English biscuits and talked about her family. Across the room the telex clattered numbers from Amman.I found myself scanning the English-language newspapers for stories of assault, suicide and murder. I did the same thing when I went on a ten-day trip, checking the local papers, wherever I happened to be, for items from the daily files of the police. I found myself trying to match the name of the victim with the name of the place where the crime was committed. Initials. The victim's initials, the first letter of the word or words in the place-name. I don't know why I did this. I wasn't looking for the cult, I wasn't even looking for murder victims especially. Any crime would do, any act that tended to isolate a person in a particular place, just so the letters matched.Again I stopped drinking, this time in Istanbul. In Athens I went running every day.

The Desert 11