Everything Beautiful Began After (5 page)

For Rebecca, the most important member of the flea market community was the laturna man, a decrepit organ grinder with a music box on wheels from the 1850s. He would wheel his cart from corner to corner, stop, turn the organ wheel, and then sing. His voice was old and cracked, like the record embedded in his machine. To Rebecca, he was like some mythical figure from another time. And she found him beautiful without understanding anything that he said.

The heat on the Athens metro was dangerous. Old women fanned themselves with rolled-up newspapers. The seats were wooden and passengers faced one another across tables, as though seated for a meal that would never come.

She had eaten two croissants for breakfast, warmed on her patio in the sun. Then, barefoot, she drank ice-cold goat’s milk from a bowl, watching cars swerve around a dead dog.

She climbed the steps from the metro station to ground level past two grimy teenagers injecting heroin. Monastiraki was packed—mostly tourists who’d spilled over from the Plaka. There were also scores of pickpockets trailing American and German tourists who had strayed from their tour groups.

The alleys of Monastiraki were dark and hot. Vendors hung merchandise from every possible corner of the street. Small alleys led to stairs that opened upon rooms of French tableware, porcelain dolls, family photographs, a silver headlamp quietly unscrewed from a Rolls Royce Silver Ghost parked at the base of the Acropolis in 1937. There were other things too, with a more sinister past. One vendor had a stack of Nazi soldiers’ helmets with the letters
SS
painted on the side in gothic script, Nazi silverware, mugs of random bullets, knives, handcuffs, and old mouse traps rusted shut.

You could buy 1930s medical instruments, a collection of playing cards from hotels in the south of France, surgical masks, Venetian masks, and monogrammed butter knives.

Her eyes drifted over the mountains of junk that lay on blankets next to refugee women with scarves tied over their heads. Everyone was coated in sweat. And in some corners, stringy meat cooked on small gas burners.

Then a face in the crowd stood out to her. A man with black hair and dark eyes, unshaven. Rebecca strained to see with the vague feeling that she knew this man.

Breathless, she squatted to find a space in the crowd through which to view him better. A woman yelled at her in Russian, suspecting a thief. Rebecca stood and walked away briskly.

An hour later, perusing the many things for sale (but still in the fury of her experience), Rebecca spotted a rare book with a paper cover.

As she reached down instinctively to pluck it from a twisted ball of tattered clothes, another hand clasped the top of the spine. Without letting go, Rebecca looked up and saw the face of the man holding the book. It was the severe handsomeness her grandfather had once possessed. The dark eyes held her in place. He smiled, and would not let go.

She released the book and stood up. The man stared at her, holding the book.

“But I saw it first,” Rebecca said impulsively.

“How do you know I haven’t already paid for it?” the man said calmly.

Rebecca tried to make eye contact with the refugee woman selling the book, but she was busy shaking her fists at a small boy urinating on the wall behind her.

He opened the book and she watched. It was a first edition Colette with uncut paper. But the second half of the book was blank. He handed it to her.

“It’s like they forgot to print the second half,” she said.

The refugee woman wanted a few pennies for the book. The man gave her ten British pounds.

“Show-off,” Rebecca said.

“Karma,” he said, and then without officially agreeing to, they walked from Monastiraki to the Ancient Agora, inadvertently brushing hands as they threaded their way through the crowds and ancient lanes.

He stopped walking to introduce himself as Henry, and when Rebecca gave her name, he said it several times, as though it were a new taste in his mouth.

“These are the same streets Plato walked down,” Henry said, after telling Rebecca a little about his work as an archaeologist specializing in human remains.

“Plato was after Socrates but before Aristotle?” she said.

“They all had great beards.”

“Beards?” she asked, smiling.

“Like Santa Claus or Père Noel in French.”

“What did he say?” Rebecca asked.

“Well, let me see, wasn’t it ‘Ho-ho-ho’?”

She laughed. “I mean what did Socrates write about?”

“I don’t really know,” Henry said.

“Yes, you do,” she said.

“Okay, he didn’t write, he just talked.”

“Like us,” she said.

At the gateway to the Ancient Agora, bony dogs lounged in a pile. Flies orbited their heads.

“This is the old marketplace,” Henry said, “where Zeno came up with a few of his lines.”

“I see,” Rebecca said. She had no idea who Zeno was, but imagined a masked man with a sword in fishing waders. Then Henry stopped walking and recited something to a slumped dog under a bush.

“Every man has perfect freedom, provided he emancipates himself from mundane desires.”

The dog sat up and began to pant.

Rebecca smiled. “He wants something to drink.”

The Ancient Agora spread out before them as patches of half-collapsed marble.

Each mound was roped off. The paths were dusty and yellow. Patches of weeds had grown around the monuments obscuring each base. A few tourists milled slowly about, unsure of whether to go on or return to their hotels and lie down.

Lovers, too, dotted the shadier benches below the olive branches, more interested in each other than the ruins that lay around them.

Then Rebecca did something uncharacteristic.

When Henry took her hand and led her through the marketplace, she not only let him take it—but held on. He was certainly handsome, but for her it was more, as though in every movement, in every word and gesture she found herself thrilled—as though a spell had been cast and his mere presence filled her with an unimaginable happiness that was without reason or condition.

Henry explained the significance of each eruption of rubble. He talked a little more about his work, and the various bones he had personally uncovered.

They walked up and down the Panathenaic Way—Athens’ ancient main street.

Henry described the statues as though they were part of his family.

Rebecca noted how the ruins looked chewed, as if by giant mouths. Henry said that most of the original structures had been torn apart by religious fanatics, war, or the most effective method of destruction, neglect.

They sat down in the only shady spot—at the Stoa of Attalos, a long covered porch of marble that led to a museum. Rebecca removed her sandals and lay her feet on the cool stone. On a podium next to them was one of the small fragments upon which the entire reconstruction had been modeled. A few original steps remained, worn into deep smiles by centuries of coming and going. People who passed behind them were visible only as shadows. Henry explained how the statues before them had been judged not good enough for major museums, but too interesting to sell privately.

Rebecca thought that this endowed them with a realistic sense of beauty. But she didn’t say it. She let her eyes roll over the sumptuous torsi of Odysseus and then Achilles. But then she decided to say something. After all, she was a painter living in Athens, no longer a poor girl from a French village whose mother wanted nothing to do with her.

“I like these so much,” she said, pointing out the figures before them.

“Why?” Henry seemed interested.

“Because they are imperfect.”

“That makes them special?”

“It makes them more realistic.”

Henry stared at them.

“I like what you’re saying,” he said. “It’s something I would never have thought of.”

Rebecca knew little of classical art. Her education had consisted of pragmatic middle-aged teachers reading loudly from books, gray gaping classrooms, windows that tilted to open. In the distance, windy fields in varying degrees of brown, a long walk to school, her tights always itching, her belly still hot from breakfast, a tractor moving slowly across the field towing birds like tiny kites.

Rebecca moved her feet because they were going to sleep.

Henry was talking, but in her mind, she saw only the hand of her old teacher writing something on the board.

It would soon be time to go home.

Her nose filled with the smell of her grandfather’s stew.

The dull light of Tuesday afternoon.

The France of legend was a place unknown to Rebecca. It was a place from which the modern youth had been tacitly excluded. She had never been to central Paris—to the museums. Despite wanting to be an artist, she was afraid she might see her mother and then scare her off completely, or worse, that she wouldn’t recognize her. But she had seen the Eiffel Tower at New Year’s Eve on television.

The Museum of the Ancient Agora was a long yellow corridor with tall glass cases and female security guards who took no pleasure in people coming in.

Henry led Rebecca to a case that at first looked empty.

Inside, was a shallow box that held mounds of dry earth from which fragments of bone were visible. Henry pointed to an abrupt line of jaw, a delicate femur, a few lingering teeth.

“It’s the grave of a child,” he said. “She was about three years old when she died. See those bracelets?”

Rebecca nodded.

“Well, she was buried with them on her wrists, and so they lie now in the position she had worn them when they laid her in the coffin.”

“When did she die?”

“About three thousand years ago.”

Rebecca looked at the child’s remains for a long time. People walked around her.

“Why do I feel so sad?” she said to Henry. “She’d be dead anyway by now.”

Henry nodded but didn’t walk away until she was ready.

They shuffled slowly past cases of small stone figures, pots, bowls, a child’s commode, and jewelry. They paused before a case of small lids with writing on each one.

“
Ostraka
,” Henry said. “The names of people who the citizens wanted exiled.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know, maybe they were assholes.”

Henry read the names of the assholes:

Onomastos

Perikles

Aristeides

Kallias

Kallixenos

Hipparchos

Themistokles

Boutalion

“If enough people wrote the same name, that person would be asked to leave the city for ten years,” Henry said.

“I wonder what would happen to them,” Rebecca mused.

“What happens to anyone in exile—they are finally free.”

“That’s a lovely thing to say,” Rebecca said.

“Is it?”

“Yes, because it’s us.”

Henry laughed. “We’re in exile?”

Rebecca nodded. “We’re free from the duties of fate.”

Henry smiled. “What a wonderful idea.”

Then they passed a cabinet of things found at the bottom of a well. There were oil lamps—which Henry said were probably dropped in at night, after being balanced on the edge as the bucket was lowered and raised. There were fragments of bowls and a casserole dish, which someone who lived close to the well must have brought to fill. There was also a small vase in the shape of a child that would have been very valuable in its time. Rebecca told Henry that it was her favorite piece.

“Because,” she explained, “it will always be a mystery why people toss out valuable things.”

“They do, don’t they?” Henry said quietly, pondering the idea. “Let’s go somewhere and think about it.”

Outside they found an empty marble bench. Henry opened the dusty leather briefcase he carried with him. Inside was a bottle of water, a slim book, and some interesting rocks he’d found.

He opened the bottle and offered it to her first. Instead, Rebecca impulsively pulled a notebook from his bag, opened it, and read a line.

“Why is there not nothing?”

“Isn’t it the most interesting thing you’ve ever heard?” Henry said.

Rebecca grinned. “Yes—did you write it?”

“No,” Henry said. “I copied it, but here’s something,” he said, passing her the bottle of water.

As she drank, several drops escaped her lips and rolled down her chest making tracks across her skin through the sweat and dust.

She saw Henry look, and their eyes met in a single moment of understanding.

In the marketplace around them, the sun was beginning to set and the narrow lanes of Monastiraki swelled with hungry people.

Chapter Seven

Henry’s apartment was in a working-class neighborhood, beside the metro tracks. Although he had very little furniture, piles of books softened the space and gave it a sense of home. Henry and Rebecca sat on his balcony overlooking a fountain. Couples perched at its edge—leaning toward the water and dipping their hands. A few dark leaves had sunk to the bottom, held in place by the rushing water. Children lowered their small bodies carefully into the cool depths. Then an angry voice from a balcony and the children scattered like marbles rolling away.

On the rickety table before them lay two whole fish that Henry had rubbed with garlic and lemon before roasting.

A neighbor had left them in a box at Henry’s front door, with instructions on how Henry should prepare and cook them. Henry also cut a brick of feta into thin slices, between which he slipped leaves of mint and basil.

“Dip them in oil like this,” he said.

Then he opened more Greek wine by holding the bottle between his knees. He explained to Rebecca why he’d come to Athens.

Like her, he was from a small cottage, but in Wales, on a hillside.

“It was like camping every day,” he confessed. “The house smelled of wet magazines and I shared my bed with a dozen animals.”

“A dozen?”

“At least.”

“Do you speak French?”

“In bits,”

“Like your work then,” she said.

“Exactly—how did you know that?”