Lily and the Lost Boy (10 page)

“Why does he have to?” Lily asked her mother when they were alone.

“Lily! I thought you'd given up whining!” Mrs. Corey exclaimed.

Lily was silent, staring at the floor.

“You must try not to resent him,” her mother said more gently. “He doesn't have much of a home, I think.”

She suspected her mother didn't like Jack any more than she did. As if aware of her thought, Mrs. Corey said, “Liking isn't the last word.”

The Haslevs were already on the quay the next morning when the Coreys arrived, boxes and straw baskets and canvas bags piled up around them. Christine sat in a little canvas chair wearing her gondolier's hat, waving a wooden spoon as though conducting an orchestra. Everybody else wore hats, too—you had to. By midday the sky would be white with heat.

On the water below them bobbed a large crescent-shaped boat. Kneeling in the middle of it was the boatman, tinkering with a kerosene engine. “He does look like Odysseus,” Lily murmured to her father. The soles of his leathery bare feet were dark as eggplant. From time to time he grabbed up a handful of greasy-looking rags and wiped his fingers, never lessening his concentration on his engine. Mr. Haslev saluted the Coreys by holding high a bottle of Thasian wine.

“I think I forgot needle and thread,” Hanne Haslev said.

Mr. Corey set down two picnic baskets. One held small bottles of carbonated lemonade and water. The other held the picnic Mr. and Mrs. Corey had made that morning: two loaves of crusty bread, hard-boiled eggs, tomatoes, cucumbers, feta cheese wrapped in damp cloths, fruit and a cake they had bought the evening before at the pastry shop that would be fresh still because it had been soaked in orange juice. “That alone will make our journey worthwhile,” said Mr. Haslev as he peered into the basket. “And with a new temple thrown in.”

It took some time to load the boat with everything the Haslevs needed for a week: sleeping bags and boxes of food and supplies. Then, as though the drama of the occasion were not enough, Odysseus stepped on the blade of a knife buried among the rags and cut his heel. He reached under his black sweater, fumbled in a pocket, and took out a package of cigarettes. With a long fingernail he slit open one of the cigarettes, then emptied the grains of tobacco into the wound. Mrs. Corey gasped. The boatman shook his head at her, smiling. “It's good,” he said. “Good. It will sterilize the wound.”

The boatman had told Lily and Christine to sit midway between bow and stern. Lily's feet rested on one of a pair of enormous oars fit for a Titan.

“But we can't go yet,” Paul said urgently. “Jack isn't here.”

She had forgotten all about Jack. For a moment she hoped he wouldn't turn up, or that they would leave without him. He was late after all. Why shouldn't they leave? But then she glimpsed him sauntering toward the boat along the quay as though he had all the time in the world. As he drew close, Lily noted that despite his cool demeanor his shoulders were rigid, his arms held tightly against his sides. Bits of straw and grass clung to his shirt and pants. He must have slept in some dark hole last night, in the acropolis or a shepherd's shelter in the hills, she guessed.

Each time she saw him, she would be disgusted by his arrogant ways. But then she would see something—like the straw and grass, or a long tear in his clothes, or his fingers, the nails so torn it was as though he'd gnawed at them in a fit—and she would feel the reluctant pity that had struck her that night in the shack on the beach.

Jack jumped down into the boat and squeezed next to Paul on a seat in the bow. Paul whispered to him, looked quickly at his mother, who was staring out to sea, and reached into the picnic basket. He took a peach and handed it to Jack, who looked at it rather critically for a moment, then took a very small bite. Oh, why didn't he gobble it down if he was hungry, Lily thought.

It was nearly seven o'clock when Odysseus stood up and shoved the boat away from the quay with one of the oars. The village by then was stirring with life. Shutters were flung open at the windows of the whitewashed houses; people had appeared in the square and opened their shops to the day. Here and there among the leaves of trees were spots of vivid color, red and orange and purple, the petals of flowers in pots and window boxes. The hill above their house rose like a great green wave, and Lily saw the apron of the theater and, more distant, the dark fortification of the acropolis.

Christine was singing in a piping voice like a bird. The kerosene engine thumped into life, and the old sailor stood up as they passed through the harbor entrance. He looked, thought Lily, as though over the years he had grown a hard, salty skin that could endure the ravages of storm and sea.

For the first hour Lily spotted familiar landmarks, the old wall, the rocks where they swam, then the beach with the shack. She glanced at Paul and Jack as they passed the beach. They were grinning and talking as they looked at the shore. How dumb boys are! How could they ever grow up to become men like Mr. Haslev or her father, or Mr. Kalligas and Odysseus?

Now the hills were much steeper, there was no sign of the great wall anymore, but still Lily could see small terraces far up their slopes where old olive trees grew. Nearly two hours after they'd left Limena, Odysseus brought the boat closer to the island. They were chugging toward a narrow, tapering peninsula. Scattered along it were huge sections of marble columns.

Mr. Haslev, shouting above the noise of the engine, told them some war party must have landed on the peninsula thousands of years earlier. The Greeks, who had quarried the marble from the hills, had fled, leaving their unfinished work behind them. Lily, looking straight up, her straw hat falling off, thought, it is the same sky they looked at. Everything else has changed but that.

They rounded the peninsula and came into a harbor where the water was as clear as glass, revealing large, flat, light-brown stones lying on the bottom, across which darted schools of tiny silver fish like filaments of wire. Odysseus turned off the engine, and they drifted toward shore. On the pebbled beach stood three whitewashed huts with blue-painted doors. They appeared deserted. But then, from a small stand of pine trees, an elderly couple emerged, hurrying past the houses toward the hill on the other side. The woman carried the same kind of wooden paddle Lily had seen the baker use, and in fact, there was a round loaf of bread on it. Odysseus said they were shepherds. “They run away from people—they only like their animals,” he said. In October, he told them, there would be a few more people, who would come to harvest the olives growing high above them on the hill.

The old couple disappeared as the bow of the boat ground over the pebbles onto the shore. A great sunny silence hung over them. Everyone sat unmoving for a moment. Then Odysseus stepped out onto land. Lily observed that the cut on his foot had closed up.

They all helped carry the supplies up the beach to a larger hut, farther back from the shore than the others, that they had not seen from the boat.

“But where is the temple?” Lily asked Mr. Haslev.

“We will soon see,” he answered. “But first the duty things.”

Mr. Corey, carrying a box of Swiss canned meat and tea and sugar, suddenly put down the box.

“Paul! Jack!” he shouted.

The two boys had gone to one of the huts, and Paul was watching Jack as he flung himself again and again at the blue door.

“What is the
matter
with that boy?” Lily heard her father say to her mother. Paul had turned to look at Mr. Corey, but Jack continued to strike the door with his hands and his shoulders. Then Odysseus shouted something of which Lily could make out only the word
no
, and Jack stopped. He stood for a moment looking at the door, then walked to where they were standing, his face sullen. Paul trailed behind.

“That house belongs to someone,” Mr. Corey said sternly.

“I just wanted to look inside,” Jack said, kicking pebbles, his shoulders hunched.

“You can look inside our house,” Mr. Haslev said, smiling. Jack didn't respond, only continued to kick at the pebbles.

Everyone except Paul and Jack crowded into the hut. The walls were thick. Small windows let in light that fell on the hard-packed earthen floor. Odysseus set down a basket he had carried in and went outside to lean against a wall and smoke a cigarette. The hut was bone-clean except for mouse droppings trailing through the tiny cavelike rooms.

Mr. Haslev swept away the droppings. Directed by Hanne, they put away supplies. Christine had set her canvas chair in the center of the largest room and was sitting on it, dreamily watching people move around her. Lily took the lemonade and water bottles down to the water and propped them up with stones. The small waves lapped gently at her hands. When she looked up, she glimpsed Jack and Paul moving among the pine trees.

The Haslevs and the Coreys had emerged from the hut, Christine straddling her father's shoulders. “Now we shall go and see the old, new temple,” Mr. Haslev said. “Actually,” he added, “it's only a part of it—the portico.”

Thirty yards or so behind the hut stood a line of willow-like trees. As they approached them, Jack and Paul suddenly appeared in front of them.

“We saw it,” Jack said. “It's little.” He looked at Paul as though for confirmation. “It's very little,” he repeated and suddenly barked with laughter, as though, Lily thought, they were all fools to be there.

Mr. Haslev looked disconcerted for a moment. Then he said firmly, “It doesn't matter at all how large or small it is.” Everyone moved on past the line of trees.

The portico stood before them in an open space, the ground covered with stones. Its slender columns were a pale apricot color, and through them Lily saw the blue sea.

“There's nothing between us and Turkey,” observed Hanne.

“This is the most faraway place I've ever been,” said Mrs. Corey.

They spoke softly as though not to wake something, or someone, who might be sleeping inside the portico.

“There are graves nearby,” Mr. Haslev told them, almost in a whisper, “and cult shrines.” Christine lowered her head until it rested on her father's.

Suddenly, Jack emitted a loud war whoop. Christine started and grabbed her father's forehead, and Lily jumped a foot from where she'd been standing. Paul was laughing silently a few yards away. When Lily glared at him, he stared back at her stonily. Everyone appeared to be making an effort not to look at Jack, but Lily shot a glance at him. He was grinning uneasily, off by himself near the trees. As she turned her head, she glimpsed Paul walking quickly to stand beside him.

“Are there snakes here?” Lily asked her mother. She felt frightened all at once. The beautiful small temple seemed a fading dream. She stared at the ground.

“You know they're pretty much everywhere,” Mrs. Corey replied. “You also know they don't go after people. Why don't you have a swim? I'll walk to the beach with you. Pretty soon, we can have our picnic.”

By the time Lily had stripped to her bathing suit, she heard the boys shouting in the water. She saw Paul leap up and try to duck Jack. They gripped each other's shoulders and sank out of sight for a few seconds, emerging smoothly and swiftly like two dolphins, to laugh and shake their heads, drops of water flying around them.

Lily sat on her towel, and her mother sat down next to her.

Lily sensed her mother's gaze on her. She felt a strange kind of embarrassment. After a moment Mrs. Corey put an arm around her. “You may feel like a wallflower, Lily,” she said, “but you look like a beach flower to me.”

Lily leaned against her for a moment.

“What does Jack want to do that for—mess up everything?” she asked as she stared at the boys who were swimming now toward the peninsula, close beside each other, their brown shoulders shining, and sleek as seals.

“I can think of a reason or two. I don't know they'd explain much,” Mrs. Corey replied. “You know, if we were at home and Paul met a boy like Jack, there would be other friends who would”—she hesitated—“who would interest him too. But here, there's only Jack.”

“What about me?” Lily burst out. “Aren't I enough?”

“And they're different, Jack and his father,” Mrs. Corey went on, as though she hadn't heard Lily, “and mysterious.” Then she began to pin up Lily's braid, taking the hairpins from her Greek bag that was embroidered with yellow stars and green crosses. “Oh, Lily,” she mumbled, a pin in her mouth. “It isn't that at all! You're enough—you're plenty!”

Lily didn't think so.

Her mother said, “No person can be
everything
for another person.”

Lily got up, ran to the water, and plunged in. As she swam underwater for a few feet, she opened her eyes and saw, dimly, the round stones on the bottom. They looked like watery loaves of brown bread. She burst through the surface and faced down the small harbor, toward the sea, toward Turkey. For some time she was able to forget all about Jack.

SEVEN

Mr. Haslev's drawings of the portico of Halyke were spread out on the long table he had found, with Mr. Kalligas' help, and which he had set up beneath the thick branches of the grape arbor in the garden. He had let Lily look at them as often as she wished since the family had returned to Limena, explaining to her each addition and change he made in the elevations.

He had improved the terrible water closet, reducing the size of the gaping hole and painting the walls white. The Haslevs had scavenged about in tiny hill villages, finding odd bits of furnishings the Greek owners were glad to sell to them.

Now they had plenty of chairs, two small tables, and even a small, intricately carved chest of drawers. They were beautiful, Hanne said. But the villagers didn't want them anymore. They wanted new plastic furniture. It was all very well, she told Lily, for foreigners like themselves to admire the lovely old stuff, but for the people of Thasos that stuff meant being poor, not having all of the things they imagined the rest of the world had.