she listened to footsteps on the stairs, going down. She wondered if she was hearing the sound of a fisherman, or a man, maybe a woman, up early to bake the day’s bread. She didn’t know; she imagined. She imagined anyone up this early would be walking with a purpose, headed for a boat or a bakery and knowing what they meant to do when they got there. She envied them their purpose, their small certainties. She had no idea what she was going to do, but something. She felt she had to do something, anything.
Outside, the stars faded and it was morning. Anne looked around, a rented room. Nothing in it made any claim; it was just stuff, there. She liked it that way, a bed a bed, a chair a chair. “Heirloom,” she said quietly, finding the word ridiculous and pretentious. The stuff of the fathers, she thought, the manstuff. And the stuff of the mothers wasn’t much better.
Five
11 Sept.
When I unpacked I set up the two tripods in the corner of the living room, one with the Nikon on it and the other with the Hasselblad. They’re still standing there, untouched. I’ve draped a blue bandanna over one and a red over the other, hooded them. Dust covers. The portable darkroom is still in its canvas bag, the last rolls of film are in the refrigerator, undeveloped. It will take more nerve than I’ve got to look at them now.
When I unpacked on Sými at the end of May it was different. I set up the dark room before I hung my shirts. I found Sými even more beautiful than I remembered, perhaps because it was the place in the photograph, and I wanted to enter the world I had seen in the photograph of the white Vespa. To be sure. And in landing on Sými I did seem to enter that world. I found the house on the first day. Driving with the owner up to it, when he said, That’s it, gesturing toward a house half hidden by rocks on the bluff overhead, a low yellow house with rust-red shutters and door, I had known it was the house for me. Walking through the cool rooms, looking through the old, wavy glass down toward Yialós, everything in me said, Yes, this is the place. I signed a lease for four months, with an option to renew at a reduced rate for the off-season.
The next day I hired a taxi and moved in. The house was small, but the design was strong; it held its own with the landscape, with the cliffs out back and the yard of exposed boulders, with the few gnarled olives and large agaves. There were two big pots of jasmine on either side of the front door, and a weathered table and chairs under the largest of the olives, where the shade was deep. The view rolled over a tumbled landscape, all dry, beautiful in sandy stone and yellowed grasses, and that smoky green of trees and shrubs in arid countries.
There was a small bedroom, hardly bigger than a closet, where I set up the dark room, and a small, hard, island bed in an alcove in the main room, where I planned to sleep. The house had escaped serious remodeling; it still had hand-carved wooden cupboards, built-in Turkish-style low couches, and a saw-edged mantle over the hearth. Very rough wooden floors, the grain standing ribbed above the worn away spaces in between. I loved the place all at once.
I walked into town, down a road that followed the bends of a dry wash. In the quiet, the insects hummed. And then I was in town and making inquiries about a motorbike. I was directed to a shop and in a row of mostly new and newish motorbikes saw a couple of old Vespas, one blue and one white. I only took one out for a test ride, the white Vespa, and only haggled a little over the price. It ran well, puttering up the steep road to my new house without undue difficulty.
That evening, I finished unpacking, putting the photograph of the man in white on the mantle. If anything, I was drawn to the photo more than ever, and I looked at it several times in the edgy light of the bare bulb that hung from the ceiling. Finally, I began to entertain the suspicion that the Vespa in the photograph might be the same one that was parked in the yard under a tree. I noted the pattern of dents and creases then took my flashlight out into the night to check. I felt very odd out there, bending over the bike in the dark, discovering that it was indeed the same one that was in the photograph. Just for a second, I felt I had become someone else. I clicked off the light. I had thought I wanted to be someone else, but it felt wrong, more like possession than getting free. But it was only a feeling, and by the time I’d picked my way back to the house by starlight, I felt fine, felt that things were going my way.
Six
10 June
Paul slouched in the shade of the clock tower at the jaws of the harbor, a tower he’d first seen in the movie Pascali’s Island. He’d been surprised to recognize it when he’d come down from Rhodes on the big catamaran, the Sými II. He wasn’t the type to read the credits at the movies, and the movie had come out years before. But the tower and the haunted look of the town behind it had stayed with him, and he’d remembered it right away.
He was waiting for his fille du jour, a girl he’d met in the morning on his way to his regular café. She’d been trying to take a picture of herself with the timer on her camera. First setting it, then sprinting around behind a picturesquely abandoned building, then strolling out all carefree around the corner just as the shutter clicked. That was the idea. But the angle was bad and the timing difficult, and she was on her third try when Paul came up and offered to take the picture. She’d found him hard to resist. They’d agreed on a picnic and a swim.
Paul saw her while she was still inside the lobby of the Alíki. The doorman held the door open wide for her and she walked outside, squinting. How she’d gotten so tan in Norway Paul didn’t know, but it wouldn’t have been from the sun. Still, the effect was good. He watched her looking for him, looking a little embarrassed, but extremely fetching. He waited a moment more then called to her, waving, and she smiled, relieved. Not, he thought, that she would have had much experience with being stood up.
He started the motorcycle he’d rented for the day and rode over to her in a long arc. The road to Pédhi runs around the harbor at Yialós, up the switchbacks to Chorió, then over the top and down through terraced slopes to the sea. Katya had pressed her head tight to his back when they’d got out on the open road and he’d goosed the throttle. But she liked the speed—he could tell—and he took that for a favorable sign.
At Pédhi the boat taxi was just pulling away from the dock when they rode up, and the boatman brought it back in so they could board for the short run to Ayios Nikólaos. The sun broke on the water in brilliant, winking pieces. The breeze as the boat chugged out toward the beach near the point felt cool enough, and Paul draped his towel across the girl’s shoulders, his fingers grazing the bare skin of her neck and long, loose hair. The boatman cut the engine and nosed the boat into the sand. Paul stood in the water and pushed the boat free, and it backed away from the beach, turned, and started back for Pédhi. Paul liked the old boats, rough with use, but painted bright, this one blue with red gunnels.
There were only a few sunbathers on the beach. But quite a few goats, some down on the sand scrounging and others looking out wild-eyed from the rocks.
They spread their towels and waited to get hot. She slipped out of her shorts and loose shirt and folded them up for a pillow. She paused, just perceptibly, standing in her bikini, then undid the snap on the top and dropped it next to her other clothes. No tan lines. On their backs, side by side, they talked, listening to each other and to the odd goat bell and to the sounds of the man who would make them lunch, now lighting his grill. She said it was the last time she would travel with her parents. He said he could understand that; she seemed too old for that.
“How about you? What are you doing here?” She asked.
“Me? I’m just hanging around. Once a month I cash a check and it’s enough.”
She pressed him.
“No. I think the world does quite all right without me.” He laughed. “I like it the way it is. I think most people find it easier to imagine up a better world than to live in this one. Does the world really need fixing?”
He smiled and suggested a swim and was up and wading out before she