The Names

In the room I put things in my overnight bag, planning to be on the early boat to Naxos, on to Piraeus from there. I heard someone whistling outside. A single birdlike note, repeated. I went out to the balcony. Two men played backgammon at a folding table set against the hotel wall. Owen Brademas stood under a tree across the street, looking up at me, arms crossed on his chest."I went up to the house.”"They're asleep," I said."I thought you'd all be up there.”"She's up at five tomorrow. We both are.”"It isn't necessary for her to be at the site so damn early.”"She has to heat water and make breakfast and do fourteen other things. She writes letters, she reads. Come on up.”There were five or six other villages on the island. Owen lived just outside the southernmost of these in a concrete dwelling called He dig house. It was located about a mile from the excavation. His assistant and the remaining fieldworkers also lived there. People in the houses scattered along the route from this village to that one must have wondered at the night-riding man sitting tall and awkward on his motor scooter, passing between the barley fields, the bamboo windbreaks.I used a towel to clean off the chair on the balcony and then I carried out a spindle chair with an upholstered seat. Intermittent wind came biting up off the water."Is this an imposition, James? Just say so.”"It'll be another hour or two before I'm ready to sleep. Sit down.”"Do you sleep?”"Not as well as I used to.”"I don't sleep," he said."Kathryn sleeps. I used to sleep. Tap sleeps, of course.”"It's pleasant here. Our house isn't well sited. It seems to catch and retain heat.”"What is it you find on those stones, Owen, that's so intriguing?”He stretched his body, easing into an answer."At first, years ago, I think it was mainly a question of history and philology. The stones spoke. It was a form of conversation with ancient people. It was also riddle-solving to a certain degree. To decipher, to uncover secrets, to trace the geography of language in a sense. In my current infatuation I think I've abandoned scholarship and much of the interest I once had in earlier cultures. What the stones say, after all, is often routine stuff. Inventories, land sale contracts, grain payments, records of commodities, so many cows, so many sheep. I'm not an expert on the origin of writing but it seems to be the case that the first writing was motivated by a desire to keep accounts. Palace accounts, temple accounts. Bookkeeping.”"And now?”"Now I've begun to see a mysterious importance in the letters as such, the blocks of characters. The tablet at Ras Shamrah said nothing. It was inscribed with the alphabet itself. I find this is all I want to know about the people who lived there. The shapes of their letters and the material they used. Fire-hardened clay, dense black basalt, marble with a ferrous content. These things I lay my hands against, feel where the words have been cut. And the eye takes in those beautiful shapes. So strange and reawakening. It goes deeper than conversations, riddles.”"Why do you call this an infatuation?”"Well it just is, James. It's an unreasoning passion. It's extravagant, foolish, probably short-lived.”All this with sweeping gestures, in open vocal rhythms. Then he laughed, although it may be more accurate to say he "laughed out," as one cries out or calls out. So much that he said and did had a tone of trustful surrender to it. It was my guess that he lived with the consequences of self-discovery and I suspected this was a more exacting hardship than anything the world might have worked out for him."And these people in the hills. You'll go back?”"I don't know. They talked about moving on.”"There's a practical element. What they eat, where they get it.”"They steal," he said. "Everything from olives to goats.”"Did they tell you this?”"I surmised.”"Would you call them a cult?”"They share an esoteric interest.”"Or a sect?”"You may have a point. I got the impression they're part of a larger group but I don't know if their ideas or customs are refinements of some wider body of thought.”"What else?" I said.Nothing. The moon was nearly full, lighting the edges of wind-driven clouds. The backgammon players rolled their ivory dice. The board was still there in the morning, set at the edge of the table, as I hurried toward the gray boat, low-riding in the calm, looking sad, half sunken. I prepared to work through the Greek lettering on the bow in my laborious preschool way but it was an easy name this time, after the island. Kouros. It was Tap who'd told me the name of the island derived from a colossal statue found toppled near an ancient gravesite about a hundred years ago. It was a traditional kouros, a sturdy young man with braided hair who stood with his arms close to his nude body, his left foot forward, an archaic smile on his face. Seventh century b.c. He'd learned this from Owen, of course.

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