The Names Read online

  The voices resumed. I bought some chocolate bars for Tap. Then I asked if there was a toilet. The man looked to his left and I asked if this meant outside and he looked again and I saw that it did.

  I walked through an alley, across a muddy yard to the toilet. It was the terminal shithouse of the Peloponnese. The walls were splattered with shit, the bowl was clogged, there was shit on the floor, on the toilet seat, on the fixtures and pipes. An inch of exhausted piss lay collected around the base of the toilet, a minor swamp in the general wreckage and mess. In the chill wind, the soft sweet rain, this doleful shed was another plane of experience. It had a history, a reek of squatting armies, centuries of war, plunder, siege, blood feuds. I stood five feet from the bowl to urinate, tip-toed. How strange that people used this place, still. It was like an offering to Death, to stand there directing my stream toward that porcelain hole.

  Driving slowly, nosing the car out of town, I passed the café, aware we were being watched, although I wasn’t sure by whom. We headed south again, in misty light, sharing some chocolate. Soon we began seeing tower houses, tall narrow structures, flat roofed except where broken near the top. They stood in the bare landscape, solitary pieces, chess pieces, unfigured, raised straight in the dead afternoon. They looked less like houses, former houses, than some mysterious use of the local stone.

  “Was I born during the Vietnam war?”

  “Don’t sound so depressed. You’re not scarred for life, I don’t think.”

  “But was I?”

  “Yes. It was our favorite war, your mother’s and mine. We were both against it but she insisted on being more against it than I was. It got to be a contest, a running battle. We used to have terrific arguments.”

  “Not smart.”

  This is what he said on those occasions when another kid might say “dumb” or “pretty stupid.” Not smart. A whole world existed in this distinction.

  He was belted in, wearing a watch cap, suspended in one of his inward states. He possessed an eerie calm at such times and was capable of the most unsettling questions about himself, his degree of sanity, his chances of living past the age of twenty, figured against world conflicts, new diseases, in a studious monotone. It was almost a talent, a knack he had, these elaborate balances, the way he dwelt in his own mind as a statistician, a neutral weigher of destinies.

  “What do Sherpas do?” I said.

  “Climb mountains.”

  “What’s in Arecibo?”

  “The radio telescope. The big dish.”

  “Let me think of some more.”

  “Think of some more.”

  “Let me think,” I said.

  On a plateau in the distance, separated by open sky, were two clusters of tower houses, long gray forms rising out of the rocks and scrub. The houses were set at varying heights so that in aggregate they resembled a modern skyline seen from a certain distance, a certain elevation, in the rain and haze, in ruins. I felt we were coming upon something no one had approached in a thousand years. A lost history. A pair of towered cities set at the end of the continent.

  They were only villages, of course, and there was nothing very lost about them. It only seemed that way, here, in the Mani, in a landscape of rocks. We found a dirt road and drove into the first of the towns. The road was unpaved all the way in, turned to mud in some places, deep pools in others. Some of the buildings were clearly inhabited, although we saw no one. There were several recent structures, made of the same stone, among the broken towers. Walled cactus gardens. House numbers in green paint. Utility poles.

  “Who am I named after?”

  “You know the answer to that.”

  “But he died.”

  “That has nothing to do with it. When you go back to London, ask your mother and your aunt to tell you about his eccentricities. He had some juicy quirks. That’s a local fruit you ought to try. And when you go back to Victoria, write me a letter now and then.”

  “But why am I named after him?”

  “Your mother and I both loved him. He was a sweet man, your grandfather. Even your nickname comes from him. Some of his business associates called him Tap. Thomas Arthur Pattison, get it? But the family didn’t use the name much. We called him Tommy. He was Tommy, you were Tap. A couple of funny guys. Even though you’re Thomas Arthur Axton and not Pattison, we wanted to call you Tap, after him.”

  “How did he die?”

  “You want to know how he died so you can decide whether or not that’s how you’re going to die. Well there’s no connection, so forget it.”

  A dog slept on a mound of olive pulp. We went a short distance, then turned off the main road again, left this time, and drove slowly up into the other towered hamlet. We saw a woman and child retreat from a doorway, heard gunshots in the hills, two soft bursts, hunters again. Stones were arranged in circular figures, threshing floors. Some houses had slate roofs topped with stones. Stones were crammed into window spaces.

  “Here’s one for you. What goes on at the Bonneville salt flats?”

  “Rocket cars. High-speed tests.”

  “What do you think of when I say Kimberley?”

  “Wait, let me think.”

  Who are they, the people in the café? Are they members? At one table an old man, a chipped white cup. At the other table a group, three or four, not Greeks. They listened when I asked about the maps. How do I know they aren’t Greek? Who are they, what are they doing here, this desolate place, in winter? What am I doing here, and have I stumbled across them, and do I want to go back, to look again, to be sure, one way or the other, with my son in hand?

  “South Africa.”

  “Now if I get it, it’s because you gave me a hint.”

  “Mining.”

  “Thanks for practically telling me.”

  “What is it then?”

  Morose, slumped in his seat. “Diamond mining,” he said.

  Minutes later we approached the coast again. The last ridge of Taygetus fell to the sea, a clean line of descent in the fading light. I stopped the car to look at the maps. Tap pointed north, catching sight of something through my side of the windshield, and after a moment I was able to see a dark mass of towers set among the terraced hills.

  “I think we ought to find a hotel or rooming house. At least figure out where we are.”

  “Just this last place,” he said.

  “You like the tower houses.”

  He kept peering through the glass.

  “Or is it the driving you like?”

  “This one last place,” he said. “Then I promise we can stop.”

  The road up was a dirt track, all stones and mud. Three or four runnels came splashing past the car, merged in places, and I began to think about the jagged rocks, the deep mud, the force of the racing water, the growing dark. Tap broke a section of chocolate from the bar, then subdivided, a piece for each of us. It was raining hard again.

  “No signs. If we knew the name of this place, we could find it on the map. Then we’d know where we are for a change.” “Maybe there’s someone up there we can ask.”

  “Although it’s probably not on the map anyway.”

  “We can ask,” he said.

  The muddy streams jumped ruts and smaller stones. I spotted dead cypress trees above us. The road kept turning, there was cactus hanging off the edges, stunted brush.

  “First you see something in front of the car and then it goes past the way it really is.”

  “Like a tree,” I said.

  “Then you look in the mirror and you see the same thing, only it looks different and it moves faster, a lot faster. Whoby obis thobat.”

  “Too bad your mother isn’t here. You could have a long talk in your native tongue. Have they given her a hole in the ground yet?”

  “She has an office.”

  “It’s only a matter of time. There’s a hole in the ground somewhere in British Columbia that she’s determined to end up in. Is that a question you were asking?”

&
nbsp; “There are no questions in Ob. You can ask a question but you don’t say it like a question in English. You say it like a regular sentence.”

  The last loop in the road took us away from our destination, momentarily, and provided a look at another towered hamlet, set along a distant ridge, and still another, a smaller cluster, silhouetted on a headland way below us. We turned up onto a long straight approach to the village and then I saw something that sent a chill through me, a delayed chill (I had to think, to translate). I stopped the car and sat there, staring out over the textured fields.

  It was a fallen rock, a ten-foot boulder standing by the roadcut to our left, a flat-faced reddish block with two white words painted across its width, the pigment running down off the letters in rough trickles, the accent mark clearly in place.

  Ta Onómata.

  “Why are we stopping?”

  “lt was stupid, coming up here. My fault. We ought to be finding a place to stay, some food.”

  “We’re turning around, you mean, just when we get here?”

  “You had your drive up. Now you’ll have your drive back down.”

  “What’s painted on that rock? Do you think that’s what they use for road signs here?”

  “No. It’s not a road sign.”

  “What is it?”

  “Just someone writing. We’ve seen writing on walls and buildings everywhere we’ve gone. Politics. We’ve even seen crowns, long live the king. If there’s no wall around, I guess they use the nearest thing. A rock in this case.”

  “Is it politics?”

  “No. It’s not politics.”

  “What is it?”

  “l don’t know, Tap.”

  “Do you know what it means?”

  “The Names,” I said.

  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.

  I sat in the office alone, sending telexes, doing numbers on the calculator. It seemed to me that ever since the first of those island nights I’d been engaged in an argument with Owen Brademas. I wasn’t sure what the subject was exactly but felt for the first time a weakening in my position, a danger.

  I also felt I was ahead of myself, doing things that didn’t correspond to some reasonable and familiar model. I would have to wait to understand.

  Why had I gone to the Mani, knowing they might be there, and why with Tap? Was he my safeguard, my escape?

  I read reports, drafted letters. Mrs. Helen arrived, chiding me for being in so early, for looking so worn-out. She went to the alcove to make tea, Zou Zou Bop Golden tea, which someone had brought back from Egypt.

  I worked until ten that night, enjoying it, finding a deep and steady pleasure in the paperwork, the details, the close-to-child-like play of the telex, of tapping out messages. Even putting my desk in order was a satisfaction and odd comfort. Neat stacks for a change. Labeled folders. Mrs. Helen had devised for herself an entire theology of neatness and decorum, with texts and punishments. I could understand, faintly.

  I went home and mad
e soup. Tap had left his hat behind. I resolved to stop drinking, although I’d had only a couple of glasses of wine in the last week or so. It was a setting of limits I thought I needed. A firmness and clarity, a sense that I could define the shape of things.

  Lindsay Whitman Keller, eating an olive.

  Voices around us, some vague occasion of the Mainland Bank, a suite at the Hilton. People stood with their hands in the air, eating, drinking, smoking, or they clutched their own elbows or engaged with others in prolonged and significant handshakes. “Is this an assigned duty?” I said.

  “Spouses have no rights. Good thing I have my teaching job.”

  “Good thing David’s not a hard-liner.”

  “This one I had to attend. Something to do with the future of Turkey. Unofficially, of course.”

  “Has the bank decided to let them live?”

  “Banks plural.”

  “Even more ominous.”

  “What’s your excuse?” she said.

  “Hard liquor. I’ve been working day and night and not minding at all. This worried me.”

  Two men seemed to be barking at each other but it was only laughter, a story about a plane skidding off a runway in Khartoum. The bank wives stood mainly in groups of three or four in their corporate aura, tolerant, durable, suffused with a light of middling privilege that was almost sensual in its effect, in the way that a woman’s arrangements with a man are a worldly thing, bargained over and handled and full of knowingness. The forced suburbia of these women’s lives, the clubby limits of the 1950s in some dead American pasturage, here was a dislocation with certain seductive attributes and balances. The duty-free car, the furlough allowance, the housing allowance, the living allowance, the education allowance, the tax equilization, the foreign assign ment premium. Often the women stood with a man in attendance, a flawlessly groomed Pakistani or a Lebanese in a well-tailored suit. Bankers from poor countries dressed like military men. They looked alert and precise and slightly in pain and they spoke a brisk and assured English with a blend of shortened forms. JDs were Jordanian dinars, DJs were dinner jackets.