The Man Who Was Left Behind (9 page)

“Okay?”

“Okay.”

He started the car again. Luckily they hadn’t been on a corner when she had made him stop.

They drove around more corners and the road kept banking upwards, and then suddenly there were lots of trees very close to the road.

They did not speak. He kept his eyes on the road but was thinking,
So, we’re not going to get out of it so easily.
And the right half of his body seemed to have taken on the sensitivity of a third eye; if his wife were to make another dash at the doorhandle, or perhaps towards him, trying to get at the wheel, he would know it even though he was looking ahead through the windshield.

The road levelled out, went down, and then up again. The air was cooler, the coolness seeming to come from the trees. Perhaps it really did, he thought—released oxygen or something, causing a freshness around the trees. But perhaps also part of the sensation was induced by a mental reaction to the green colour. The previous spring, the university store had had a large pile of notebooks on sale, the paper of which was a peculiar green colour, and inside the cover of each notebook you could read a statement to the effect that “research had shown” green to be extremely soothing to the eyes. He had bought one and found the colour irritating, but there might be something in the idea after all.

All these things were connected: the eye, the mind, the body. Hip bone connected to the thigh bone. Yet even when the whole business was going right and healthy, it was fundamentally mysterious. Research showed, but you could dig into your past till you were blue in the face and it still wouldn’t help you to feel confident walking into a room full of strangers if that was the sort of thing that had always made you nervous. Research could probably stop you washing your hands fifty times a day, but then you’d start something else, like picking your nose. Or worrying about postcards.

They came over a ridge and began to descend into the valley.

“This is it,” he said. He guided the car up a slope and around to the right where there were three other cars parked
under the trees. They could see the weathered wood railing and the steps going far up the mountainside, and the two lower ponds and the little waterfalls between. Everywhere was the sound of water.

“It’s pretty,” she said.

He locked up the car and took her arm. He led her past the postcard stands and made sure that he didn’t seem to be trying to distract her attention. And she didn’t notice.

They began to climb the stairway. The wood didn’t look very solid. Down below, where there were other railings around the watercourses, the wood looked yellow, like bamboo, and the water was a vivid green, even greener than the trees. Three people, slung with cameras, came down the path and passed them. It was very narrow, and John had to pull Amy back from the edge. There were more people farther up, and it looked like a long climb.

“Do butterflies need a lot of water?” she asked.

“I don’t know, Amy.”

“It’s a nice place for them, though. Think of having a place where you go to every year like this. They fly for miles and it’s the same place they’ve been coming to for generations.”

“Yes,” he said. “It’s nice.”

“I wonder why people don’t do those things. I mean, why don’t people have places they go to? Migrating and hibernating and all that. It’s very strange when you think about it. But then it’s very strange if you suddenly wonder why not.”

They climbed to the level of the third pool and looked down at the emerald circular ponds in their nests of yellow railings, with the sun dappling over everything through the leaves of the overhanging trees.

“It looks like some place in Africa,” he said. “I wonder what makes the water so green. Maybe it’s very cold.”

They stood there for a while and then she looked farther
up the path. He could see that she was suddenly frightened of going up to the top. She looked back down at the water again.

“It makes you dizzy to look all the way down.”

“Yes,” he said. “It’s a long climb to the top, too. How are your loafers holding out?”

“Oh, they’re okay. John, did you ever think—you know, people who say there isn’t any life after death think it’s because it would be so peculiar. But it’s even more peculiar to be alive in the first place, isn’t it? So why not?”

“Well,” he said, “I don’t know. I think it’s one of those things you believe in or you don’t. I don’t believe it has much to do with thought. I mean, you’re predisposed to believe one way or the other. And I don’t think it has much to do with how you feel about the sacredness of life, if that’s what’s bothering you. Do you want to try going to the top?”

“I’m sort of tired,” she said.

“As a matter of fact, I’ve had enough of a climb, too.”

They began the descent.

“It’s being on board the boat for so long,” he said.

“But we walked all over Delos and Crete.”

“But your legs get to feel different.”

At the bottom of the path she saw the postcard stand and made a beeline for it.

“Oh!” she said, picking up one card after another. “Oh look, they’ve got pictures of all the butterflies.” She handed him a picture of a leafy tree with a brown trunk. He didn’t see any butterflies. Then he looked more closely and realised that the entire trunk of the tree was composed of hundreds of butterflies lying next to each other.

“That’s amazing,” he said.

“Aren’t they pretty? It looks like they’re just sleeping there.” She kept picking up more postcards. “Just sleeping,” she cooed.

The woman behind the stand had caught the spirit of the thing and began to select better and better pictures to be looked at.

“Look at this one, John,” Amy said, and handed him a picture of a flight of pink butterflies taken against a background of dark leaves. If you squinted your eyes they looked exactly like flamingoes flying in formation.

The postcard-seller was even shorter than Amy Larsen. The top of her head only came up to Amy’s chin. She began to talk in French about the butterflies, and handed John a piece of paper which had the history of the place written on it.

“What’s she saying?”

“Wait a sec. Her French is worse than mine.” He interrupted her and asked why the butterflies chose that particular spot. It seemed a nonsensical thing to ask, but the woman answered him straight away: it was because of the trees, because of the resin in the leaves.

“Isn’t that interesting,” Amy said. Then she picked up one of the things on the tray full of keychains, paperknives, cheap unworkable ballpoint pens, and other souvenir objects.

It was a green-enamelled brass frog with red glass eyes. Its head was on a hinge and the mouth opened up into a spout. When you lifted the head, the belly of the frog became an ashtray and the bottom jaw a cigarette-rest. She clicked the head up and down several times, and then bought the frog, though neither of them smoked.

They walked back to the car. A Greek soldier passed them on their way. Two other cars had pulled in to the left of theirs, and six soldiers were standing leaning against the fenders. Amy’s hands were clenched on her postcards as they walked forward. John unlocked the car door, got in and leaned over to unlock the other door, and pulled the handle back.

She sat down on the seat and left the door open. She put all her postcards up on the dashboard and set the frog beside them. John got the map out of the door pocket. He left his door open, too. Now that they were away from the coolness of the water, the heat was noticeable.

“Why are they all looking at me like that?” she said.

“Soldiers always look at girls, honey.”

“They’re looking at me like I was some kind of a freak.”

“You’re just freakishly Nordic, that’s all. Probably your hair.”

“My hair is dark.”

“Not in this country.” He opened the map. “We’ve got time to go someplace else. We could go visit this temple. That’s on the other side of town, but we’d have time.”

“Okay,” she said. She began to click the frog’s head up and down.

“Do you like my frog?”

“Sort of.”

She opened the head again and looked into the bowl of the frog’s belly.

“It’s built just like me. Slim as a lily down to my tiny waist and from there on in like a battleship. Like a kangaroo.”

“The ideal female shape,” he said, punching the map to make it fold up again. He looked to the left and saw that the soldier they had passed had returned, and three of the men were drinking out of bottles.

“Lucky I bought so many stamps,” she said, and took a ballpoint pen out of her purse.

“You cleaned them out. Would you like something to drink?”

“No, thanks.”

“I’m thirsty. I’m going to see if they’re selling soft drinks back there.”

“I’ll write my postcards.”

“Okay. If they’ve got any ice cream or something like that, would you like that instead?”

“No, thanks.”

He got out and closed the car door after him, knowing that she would be crouching over her postcards, having dragged her hair over most of the left side of her face because the soldiers were looking at her. And then, of course, she really would look like a freak.

At the postcard stand the woman sold him a fizzy lemonade, opened the cap, and gave him a straw. It wasn’t very cold. He walked back to the car and drank most of it there. Beside him Amy was writing away furiously. He drank through the straw and put his right hand on the back of her neck and then squeezed her shoulders.

“It isn’t inherited, Amy,” he said.

She went on writing. He finished the lemonade and looked at the postcards she had finished, lying beside the hideous frog. The date, still complete with year, was on each, and the left-hand side crammed with minute writing. He got out of the car and looked around for a basket or some sort of container to put the bottle in, but there wasn’t one. The soldiers had stood their empties at the foot of one of the trees. He put his bottle down beside the others and went back to the car.

He waited till she had finished writing the postcard she was working on, and said, “All set?”

“I haven’t finished yet.”

He appropriated the remaining cards.

“How many have you done?”

“Wait. One, two, three—six.”

“Well, that’s quite a lot. We’ll leave the rest till we get back to the hotel. You wouldn’t want to get stuck there without any and have to go out and buy some new ones.”

“But if I finish these, I can send them off and get some more later.”

“Nope. Right now we’re going to see that temple.”

He put all the written postcards into the outside pocket of her purse, leaned over her, and closed her door. She kissed him on the cheek.

He started the car and gave her a hug with his right arm.

“Better put that away,” he said. “I don’t want it to fall off.”

“It can’t break. It’s brass or something.”

“Supposing I had to put on the brakes suddenly? It could hit one of us in the eye.”

She put the frog in her purse and he backed the car out and down the slope and on to the road. He hadn’t expected the kiss and it had made up for a lot of things.

They were halfway to the town when she said, “I’ve got to go to the bathroom again.”

“Didn’t you go at the hotel?”

“Yes, but I’ve got to go again.”

“Can you wait till we get into town?”

“No.”

He looked for a field with bushes and finally found one, pulled over to the side of the road, and stopped. She bolted out the door and ran across the field, the handbag, which contained wads of Kleenex as well as everything else, clutched to her chest.

He leaned forward over the wheel and closed his eyes. A car passed on the road. He sat up again, then leaned back on the wheel, and by mistake sounded the horn. When she returned through the field, she said, “What’s the rush?”

“No rush. We’ve got plenty of time.”

“You were honking the horn.”

“Oh, I leaned up against the wheel. I didn’t mean it to hurry you.”

They drove on, back through the town, and he decided to be smart and get her to mail half the postcards so that
she wouldn’t pull another stunt like the one earlier in the morning.

“How nice you are to remember. It just slipped my mind,” she said, ducking out of the car to put the postcards in the slot. He had made sure that she took the ones she had written on instead of the others; they were all stamped. She had bought one hundred air mail stamps in Heraklion. That wasn’t counting the stamps she had been buying for two weeks. He hadn’t even known she had brought the money with her, and then she had simply said, “Oh yes, just in case of emergencies.”

They drove through the town and he kept along the shore road. It wasn’t so far as he had thought.

“Look,” she said. “There’s a temple.”

He overshot, and parked the car off the road where he had stopped, and they walked back along the tar road. On either side of them grew flat fields full of wildflowers. They could see the tops of the orange-yellow temple columns, only three and a half of them left, the three entire ones with the epistyle on top. And when they moved into the field and then downhill, they could see some big trees in the distance over to the right, and ahead beyond the building, the ocean dancing with light.

“Oh, I like it,” she said. “It’s like the bones of a lion. Is it Apollo’s?”

“I think so, but I may be wrong. I should have brought the guidebook along.”

“Let’s just walk around,” Amy said.

They walked hand in hand, looking at the temple, the fields, the sea. A fresh, light wind blew inshore.

“That’s nice, to have a breeze,” she said. “It was hot in that valley once we got away from the water.”

“Let’s sit down.”

They walked forward into the columns and sat on a broken slab of stone. The remains of the temple looked
smaller and much less grand from inside, but so did every temple he had ever seen except the Parthenon. They sat looking in the direction of the ocean. He wanted to talk to her, and realized that he couldn’t.

The first days in Athens had been all right. And the trip through the Peloponnese had started out all right, too. They had arrived in Corinth near lunchtime and gone through the gates. Amy had been hopping up and down with anticipation, since they could already see it: a temple islanded in a sea of yellow flowers, just like the picture on the cover of his highschool second-year Latin book. They had gone in and sat down inside the temple, and after a while had had the place to themselves. It was very hot for the time of year, he had thought. The sun had come straight down. And when they had left and come to the gate, it had been padlocked and there was nobody around. “I’ll climb over and hunt somebody out,” he had said. And she had told him no, that she was climbing over, too. And up she had gone, over the wire fence. He had been worried that she would slip and fall, and had tried to stop her, but she had gotten angry, and had gone over like a bundle of laundry, and then had been so proud of her athletic ability and laughed with pleasure. Later in the day she had had a bad headache from the sun, and he hadn’t felt so well himself, but he had thought for the first time in a long while that everything was going to be all right. They had stayed at a hotel on the beach, where they were the only couple in the whole place, and that was all right. And then in Olympia, the weather had been beautiful and there were pine trees everywhere with the wind making swooshing noises in the branches, and that had been nice. But then they had gone to Mycenae, and that was the place where he had become really worried about heatstroke. The sun kept pounding down like lead over them. She had been holding a branch of orange blossoms he had yanked off a
tree from the car window. And they had walked around the ruins for about fifteen minutes, and sat down so that he could read the guidebook aloud. He had been reading for quite a while before he noticed the stupefied look on her face. “This is a terrible place,” she had said. “It makes you feel that people have been murdered here. Not just one or two people. Hundreds. Thousands. It’s monstrous and squat and barbaric and awful.” Not seriously, in an exasperated way, he’d asked, “Well, would you like to go?” And the look had left her face and she had said, “Yes, please.” Nauplia had not been a wild success, but not a disaster, either, and on the day they had gone to Epidaurus, he had felt everything take a turn for the better. They had gone to see the theatre, and she had insisted on climbing all the way up to the very last row of stone seats, where they had sat down. “Oh, what a wonderful place,” she had said. “What a wonderful place. I only wish it was the right time. To see the plays here. It wouldn’t even matter that we couldn’t understand them.” And while they were sitting there, with the enormous theatre going down, down like a huge bowl in front of them, about four busloads of Greek schoolchildren in dark blue uniforms had come running on to the stage, three teachers following along behind. They had been able to hear every separate footfall. The children had fanned out over the stage and then climbed up and seated themselves in the first five rows. And the head teacher, a man, had stood on the centre stone and given them a talk in a perfectly ordinary tone of voice, and from where they had been watching, way up in the topmost row, he and she had been able to hear every syllable as clear as a bell, although they could not understand the language. They had reached for each other without saying anything, and with her hand in his he had thought that he would never forget this, he could never forget it as long as he lived, and it would always make him
feel good just to think about it. Later in the day they had gone through the museum and seen the reconstructions of how the columns had been arranged in a snail-like interior passage of one of the shrines. They walked around and around, looking at the design which changed at every point. He did not mind reconstructions unless they pretended to be the real thing; he found it very difficult to visualise what the ruins would have looked like with the inner walls and a roof on top. But these passages in the museum had the original marble capitals set on top of the columns, and they were carved with lily patterns, which had the strength and delicacy of living plants. That was what all the business of classical things was about: if once they hit that balance, the result was an impression of reality so strong that it was unearthly, and as wonderful as if they had created a breathing human being. They had both been happy that day. But then there had been the drive back to Athens and difficulty about the hotel, where the staff had read the date the wrong way around, or rather, the European way. Then the boat, where their cabin was very cramped. But still he had had the feeling that it was going to be all right.