Slack Tide

Recording Thirty-One

*[Recording 31. Upstairs kitchen, above the bakery, South Halsted Street, Chicago. Sunday, late August, 4:10 p.m. Present: F. M. (Mrs. Fotiní Margaríti, 84); S. M. (Stávros Margarítis, 16, her grandson, translating); and me. Window open. Traffic on Halsted. A fan on the counter. The ovens downstairs are off for the afternoon, but the floor is still warm through my shoes.]*

*F. M.: (in Greek) Is it on? The little red light?*

*S. M.: She wants to know if it's on.*

*Q.: It's on.*

*F. M.: (in Greek) Good. Then everything I say now is said. Nobody can take it back out of the air.*

*S. M.: She says now it counts.*

*[Sound of a drawer. A paper bag. Something flat laid on the oilcloth.]*

*F. M.: (in Greek) This card I bought in Piraeus, on the quay, the morning of the ship. February of sixty-three. I was twenty. I bought it to write to my mother from the sea, and I never wrote it, because what do you write to your mother from the sea? "Mama, it is wet." So it stayed in my bag. Then in the drawer. Sixty-three years in a drawer in Chicago, a card of my own spring.*

*S. M.: She bought it the day she left. She never sent it. It's a picture of the spring on the island. The Mána.*

*Q.: Can you describe the picture for the recording, Stav?*

*S. M.: Uh. Okay. It's black and white but somebody painted it after. There's a fountain, marble, set into a hill, with four spouts, and water coming out of all four, and somebody painted the water blue, which, it's water, it's not blue. There's a big plane tree over it. A platanos. Two women with clay jars, and a kid holding a donkey. Behind them there are these steps going up the hill like stairs for giants, with green on every step. That's the terraces. And at the bottom it says in print, ASKYRA, THE SPRING AT KRYOVRYSI.*

*F. M.: (in Greek) Tell him about the birds.*

*S. M.: Oh. On the marble, around the spouts, there's carving. Two birds and a tree. And a fish. Yiayiá says the fish has a face.*

*F. M.: (in Greek) The fish laughs. The man who cut it was a joker. He cut it in 1891 and everyone who drinks there has looked at that fish for more than a hundred and thirty years and smiled. Now there is a fence in front of it.*

*S. M.: She says there's a fence in front of it now.*

*Q.: A fence?*

*F. M.: (in Greek) Wire. On posts. With a little sign. My cousin's daughter sent me the photograph on the tablet. A sign in English and Greek. PRIVATE PROPERTY. ASKYRA SPRINGS. At my own spring. Where I washed my hair the night before my wedding.*

*[Pause, eleven seconds. The fan.]*

*S. M.: Do you want me to—*

*F. M.: (in Greek) No. Write. Turn the card over. Read him what I wrote last night.*

*S. M.: Okay. So. She wrote on the back last night. It's in Greek, it's her handwriting, it's kind of hard, she does the old letters with the extra curls. I'll go slow.*

*S. M.: (reading, translating line by line) "The water of the Mána, the hours of Sunday, as my father kept them, as I remember them, so somebody has them." Then it's a list. "From the first light until the sun reaches the top of the plane tree: Vasilákis. From the plane tree until the shadow leaves the fish: Gavalás, and the widow Kouri through his channel. From the fish until the bell of the school, which does not ring on Sunday, so: until the time the bell would ring: Margarítis, my father, Pétros. Two hours less a little. From the bell to the noon: Rousákis and Lambrou, shared, half and half, they always argued." Grandma, did they actually argue?*

*F. M.: (in Greek) Every Sunday of my childhood. Go on.*

*S. M.: "From the noon until the shadow touches the second step: the mill. From the second step to the fourth step: Mavrommátis. From the fourth step: the hour of the passer-by." And then she wrote, "No one owns it. It is the seventh. It is for whoever comes." And then the afternoon, there's more names, and then at the bottom she wrote — wait.*

*F. M.: (in Greek) Read it.*

*S. M.: "To the father of the boy who records. He tells me you race the old cars. In September they race the old cars on my island, and the ones who put the fence are paying for it. I do not ask you anything. I am only telling you where the water is." And then she signed it. Fotiní, daughter of Pétros, from the house under the third terrace.*

*[Pause.]*

*Q.: Mrs. Margaríti. I didn't — I don't think I told you he races.*

*S. M.: You did. You told my dad. At the counter. Two weeks ago. You said your dad was building an old car in a barn and you could hear it from your room at night. My dad told her. Everybody tells her everything. It's the bakery.*

*F. M.: (in Greek) What is he saying?*

*S. M.: He's saying he didn't know he told us.*

*F. M.: (laughing, in Greek) A boy who records other people's voices for a living forgets his own. Tell him that is how you know he's a good one. Tell him to send the card to his father. Not a photograph. The card. A card should go through the post. It should get a little tired. It was in a drawer sixty-three years. Let it travel.*

*Q.: I'll mail it tomorrow.*

*F. M.: (in Greek) Tomorrow. Good. And turn off the little light now. I want to eat a peach.*

*[End of recording. 14 minutes, 52 seconds.]*

---

He mailed it on Monday from the post office on Canal Street, in a stiff envelope with a square of cardboard behind it, and then stood outside on the hot pavement with the empty feeling of a man who has let go of something that was not his to hold.

Chicago at the end of August smelled of hot asphalt and the lake, a block of blue at the bottom of every eastbound street, like a second sky laid on the ground. The son had been here since June, on the placement his program had found him: three days a week at the museum on the corner of Halsted and Van Buren, where the oral history room had a window onto the street and a shelf of tapes going back to the seventies, and two days a week at a senior lunch in a community hall three blocks south, where the men played cards with the violence of generals and the women judged the soup.

He had recorded thirty-one people since June. Fotiní Margaríti had been the seventh, and then the eleventh, and then, because she would not stop being interesting, the nineteenth and the twenty-fourth and now the thirty-first, and the bakery had become the place he ate when he forgot to eat.

The bakery had been on Halsted since 1971. Before that it had been on Harrison, at the edge of the old neighborhood the old people still called the Delta, the triangle of Halsted, Harrison and Blue Island, most of which had been knocked down in the early sixties to build the university and the expressway, so that whole blocks of coffee houses and grocery stores and men's clubs had simply been lifted off the ground and carried away in trucks. Fotiní had arrived in February 1963, at Union Station, with one suitcase and the unwritten postcard, and had walked into the last months of the Delta while it was being demolished around her. "I came to the new country," she had told him on recording nineteen, "and it was already falling down. So I felt at home."

Her son Kóstas ran the bakery now. He was fifty-eight, heavy in the shoulders, with flour in the hair of his forearms at every hour of the day and a voice that could stop a delivery truck from across the street. His wife Maureen taught chemistry at a high school on the North Side and had grown up in Bridgeport, Irish on both sides, and she had learned to make the island's sesame rings better than her mother-in-law, which was a scandal the family discussed often and with pleasure. Their son Stávros, who would only answer to Stav at school and only to Stávros at home, was sixteen and played the violin in his school orchestra and had, this summer, found his grandfather's cassettes of island music in the family's private archive, digitized by a cousin, and started to learn the tunes by ear in the room over the ovens, with the window open so that the whole of South Halsted got to hear him go wrong.

The network was a private place the family kept, and Maureen ran it. Every relative who had ever left the island was supposed to be in it, and most of them were: a family tree that ran back to the 1790s on one branch and stopped dead in 1922 on another, a map with pins in it where the island's people had gone, a shared box of photographs and letters that a cousin in Melbourne was scanning one album at a time. On the map there was a pin for the island itself, one tiny green dot in the blue Aegean east of Tinos. Around it, scattered across the world like seeds thrown from a hand, there were other pins. Forty-one in Chicago. Nineteen in Astoria, Queens. Thirty in Melbourne. Twelve in Johannesburg. Six in Montreal. Four in a single street in Baltimore. The island had fewer than three hundred people living on it in winter. The map said there were more than two thousand of them elsewhere.

"The word is *xenitiá*," Fotiní had said, on recording twenty-four, when he asked her what the map was. "The being-away. It's a place. You live in it. Everyone on that map lives in the same country, and it isn't America."

He took the Pink Line home that evening because it was the long way, past the murals on Eighteenth Street that he had started to know by heart from the train window, and sat with his notebook open on his knee and wrote down what the card had said, while he still had Stav's voice in his ear. *The hour of the passer-by. No one owns it. It is the seventh. It is for whoever comes.*

He looked at that for a while, swaying with the train.

Then he wrote the weather — *hot, haze over the lake, wind west, 91* — and closed the notebook.

---

The card reached the family house on the California coast on Thursday.

Eight's father brought it up the lane, the way he brought up everything, with the lieutenant in his right hand and the mail in his left, walking slowly in the morning glare with the sea at his back. Eight watched him from the barn. He had been in the barn since four, under a car that had come in a crate from the north of England three weeks earlier, and he had heard the mailbox lid from inside the barn, as he always did, because his father let it fall with a particular two-note clap when there was something in it worth carrying.

His father did not go to the kitchen. He came to the barn door and stood in the bright slot of it, looking in, with the light behind him so that he was only a shape: a tall old man going narrow with age, holding a cane and an envelope.

"From Chicago," he said. "Your son's hand on the front. Not his on the inside."

Eight rolled out on the creeper and sat up. He wiped his hands on the rag and took the envelope and slit it with his thumbnail, and slid the cardboard out, and the card from behind the cardboard.

He looked at the front first. The marble fountain set into the hillside. The four spouts. The plane tree. The two women with their jars and the boy holding the donkey's head. The terraces going up and up behind them, step over step, each with its line of green, and someone a long time ago with a fine brush had painted the water a blue it had never been and the leaves of the plane tree a green that was almost right. In the marble, between the spouts, he could just make out the carving: two birds, a tree, and a fish.

He turned it over.

The back was covered in Greek, in blue ink, in a hand that had learned its letters in the 1940s and had not forgotten one curl of them. Down the left side ran a column of names. Down the right side ran another column, of what he took at first to be times and then saw were not times at all, because there were no numbers in it. Paper-clipped to the corner was a sheet torn from a pocket notebook, in his son's small quick print, a translation, line by line, with a note at the top: *Mrs. Fotiní Margaríti, 84, born on Askýra. Wrote this from memory the night before she gave it to me. She says she is only telling you where the water is. Recording attached in the family folder. — the boy who records.*

Eight read the translation, and then he read the Greek again, as far as he could, matching the names in one to the names in the other. *Vasilákis. Gavalás. Margarítis. Rousákis. Lambrou.* He found the plane tree in the Greek, and the fish, and the second step of the terraces. He found the bell of the school that did not ring on Sunday.

"It's a timetable," his father said, behind him. "For water."

"Yes."

"Without a clock."

"They didn't need one. They had the shadows." Eight held the card to the light from the door. "The sun reaches the top of the tree. The shadow leaves the fish. The shadow touches the second step. It's a sundial the size of a hillside, and every family on it knew where their hour began."

His father came in. He did not come in often, because the barn floor had a lip at the door that the lieutenant did not like, and because, he said, the barn was his son's country and he did not cross borders without a visa. He came and stood by the workbench and held out his hand for the card, and Eight gave him the card and the translation together.

The old man read slowly, without his glasses, at arm's length. When he reached the bottom of the column he stopped. Eight saw where. His father's thumb had come to rest beside a line in the son's print: *From the fourth step: the hour of the passer-by. No one owns it. It is the seventh. It is for whoever comes.*

"They kept one," his father said.

"Kept what?"

"An hour." He did not look up. "Every place that has too little water keeps an hour like that, if it is a decent place. Not for the families. For the man on the road. The one who isn't from there." He flipped the card to the fountain side, studied the laughing fish, and flipped it again. "In my mother's village it was the seventh too."

He gave the card back.

Eight took it. He did not ask anything. He had learned, over a long life, that the questions you most wanted to ask his father were the ones that closed him like a shutter, and that if you waited, sometimes, years later, the shutter opened by itself onto a view you had not known was there.

His father stood a moment longer, looking at the car on its stands.

It was close to finished: a two-door saloon from 1977, square-shouldered and plain, the kind of car once parked by the million outside English houses, which in another life, with a different heart in it, had won rallies in forests and deserts and on mountain roads across half the world. This one had been found in a shed in Cumbria by a woman who had spent forty years preparing these cars for other people and who had rebuilt it for him over a winter without once telling him what it cost, and had put it in a crate, and written on the crate in marker pen, *Don't thank me. Just don't bend it.* Its shell had been seam-welded and caged. Its arches had been flared out over wide, short wheels. In its engine bay sat a two-liter four-cylinder engine with sixteen valves and two cams driven by a belt, breathing through a pair of big twin-choke carburetors that drank air with a sound like someone sucking the last of a drink through a straw, and when it was running it would rev past eight thousand and make a noise his mother had compared, the first time she heard it, to a saw going through a sheet of tin.

The paint was new. It was the silvery green-gray of the underside of an olive leaf. On the doors, in black, there was the 8.

"It is a good color," his father said, "for an island."

"I haven't decided on the island."

"Yes, you have." His father turned to go, and paused at the door, and looked out across the field to where the float hung on its nail on the corner post of the porch: the old orange float from the other side of the world, faded to the white of a bleached shell, with its black 9 almost worn away, turning very slowly in the wind off the sea. The son had hung it there in December, facing the water. "You decided when the boy put it in the post. Tell your mother before you tell your wife. She likes to know first and pretend she was told second."

---

His mother was on the porch with a bowl of beans to top and tail and a crossword weighted under the bowl. She did not look up when he sat down beside her on the step.

"Greece," she said.

"How did—"

"Your father walked to the barn. He does not walk to the barn for California." She snapped a bean. "Where in Greece?"

"An island in the Cyclades. Askýra. East of Tinos."

"Is there water?"

He laughed, because it was the question she had asked of every place he had ever gone, since he was nineteen, before she asked anything else. Is there water. As if a place without water were not a place at all.

"There's a spring," he said. "That's the trouble."

She put down the bean and looked at him over her glasses. He was fifty-nine years old, and she looked at him exactly the way she had looked at him at nine, when he had come home from school with a cut lip and a story that did not quite add up.

"Then it is the right place," she said, and went back to the beans.

His wife was at the far end of the field, at the edge where the grass gave way to the bluff, cutting the dead heads off the roses that should never have grown that close to the sea and grew there anyway out of pure contrariness. She saw him coming and straightened, and pushed her hair off her forehead with the cuff of her gardening glove, the shears in her other hand.

"How long?" she said.

"Most of September."

"Is the boy going?"

"He's already halfway there. It's his card."

She nodded. She looked past him, at the porch, where the float was turning on its nail, and at his mother on the step, and at the barn, with its big door rolled up and the green-gray car just visible inside, square and low on its stands.

"Bring me something that grows there," she said. "Not a picture. Something I can put in the ground."

"In this wind?"

"The roses manage." She went back to the bushes. "And come home before the rain. You always come home after the rain, and then you sit on the porch and complain that you missed it."

He stood a moment beside her in the salt wind, with the card in his shirt pocket, and the sea below the bluff going in and out over the rocks in long gray-green breaths, and somewhere very far to the east, on the other side of a continent and an ocean, a marble fish with a laughing face looking out through a wire fence at a hillside of dry steps.

Olive-Leaf Green

For anyone who asks.

*A man at a dinner asked me once why I race cars older than his wine. He meant it kindly. He had seen modern rally cars, which are astonishing, and he could not see why anyone would choose a box from 1977 with no power steering and two carburetors that need retuning every time the weather changes. I told him the old ones lie to you less. Everything the road does comes up through the rim and the seat and your own heels, with nothing in between to soften it or to correct you. You are never told what you would like to hear. I find that restful. He said it sounded exhausting. We were both right.*

---

The engine fired on the last Saturday of August at twenty past six in the morning, and every dog on that stretch of coast answered it.

It coughed. It caught on two cylinders, then three, a ragged stammer that shook the whole shell on its stands, and the twin carburetors gasped and spat a little blue cloud out of their trumpets, and then all four cylinders found each other at once and the sound climbed into a hard, flat, metallic bark that filled the barn to the rafters and went out through the open door and across the field and down the bluff to the sea. Eight held it at three thousand with his foot and listened. Under the bark there was a whine, high and thin, from the straight-cut gears in the box, and under that a hiss from the carburetors drawing air so hard he could feel the draft of it on the backs of his hands when he leaned in over the fender.

He let the oil come up to warmth, and blipped it once, and the needle on the tachometer flicked to six thousand and fell back like something thrown and caught, and the exhaust note cracked off the inside of the barn roof so sharply that a pair of swallows nesting in the beam over the door shot out into the morning, protesting.

When he switched it off, the silence afterward rang. The barn smelled of hot oil, raw fuel and paint still curing on the exhaust manifold. Out on the porch, the old float turned on its nail.

His sister's younger girl was standing in the doorway in pajamas and rubber boots, with both hands over her ears and an expression of pure delight.

"Again," she said.

"Your mother will kill me."

"She's already up. Grandpa's making her coffee. He said if that thing was going to go off like a cannon at dawn somebody in this house should at least be awake for it on purpose." The girl took her hands off her ears. She was eleven and had decided over the summer that she was going to be either a vet or a rally driver, depending on which turned out to involve more mud. "Is it going to Greece in the plane?"

"Who told you it's going to Greece?"

"Grandma. She said you had the look." The girl came in and walked all the way around the car, slowly, not touching it, the way she walked around horses at the stables down the coast. At the driver's door she stopped, and studied the 8. "Why is it green?"

"It's the color of the underside of an olive leaf. Where it's going, there are olive trees on every hill. When the wind blows, the leaves turn over and the whole hillside goes silver for a second." He showed her with his hand, flat, then tilted. "Like that."

"So it'll be camouflaged."

"In a manner of speaking."

She considered the car with her head on one side. "It's very square," she said finally. "For a fast car."

"It was a family car once. Somebody's dad took it to the shops. Then some people in England took cars like it and put new engines in them and went into the forests and won everything for about ten years." He patted the roof. "It's a family car that ran away."

The girl liked that. He watched her like it, and file it away, and he knew that he would hear it again at dinner, improved.

---

He did hear it at dinner, improved, at seven, at the long redwood table in the dining room, with the whole family round it: his mother at the stove end, his father at the far end with the lieutenant leaning on the wall behind him, his wife beside him, his sister and her husband, the older girl down from her college for the weekend and the younger one with her elbows on the table, giving her account of the morning. The car had, in her version, run away from a family in England at the age of four, after an argument about the shopping, and joined a gang of other cars in a forest, where they had trained in secret for years. The older girl rolled her eyes and asked for the salad.

The son's place was empty. His mother had set it anyway. She always did.

"He called this afternoon," his wife said. "From the bakery. He said to tell you the family are flying from O'Hare on Thursday. The father and the boy. He says the grandmother won't go."

"She's eighty-four," said his sister.

"He says that's not why." His wife took a piece of bread. "He says she told him she left the island once and it nearly killed her, and she's not going to do it twice. She says she'll go with her voice instead. Whatever that means."

"It means she'll be on the tablet every night at six," said his mother, from the stove end, without turning round. "Telling them what to eat."

Everyone laughed. His father did not. He was looking down the table at Eight, across the dishes and the glasses and the two lamps, with the expression he wore when he was doing a sum in his head and had got to the part that needed carrying.

"The boy should go with you," he said. "In the plane. Not with the family."

The table went quiet.

"He's already arranged to go with them," said Eight. "They're expecting him. He's recording the father. He's—"

"I know what he's doing." His father reached for the water jug and poured, slowly, his hand steady. "He'll be with them every day after. Let him have the crossing with you. It's a long way over the water. You can say things over water that you can't say on land."

Eight's wife looked at him sideways, and then at her plate.

"Where would I collect him?" Eight said.

"There's a field outside Chicago. You know the one. You used it in the spring of '04 when the snow shut everything else." His father drank. "Ruiz will remember. Ruiz remembers every field in America that doesn't have a control tower."

---

Ruiz did remember.

He said so on the phone that night, with a ball game on the radio behind him. A grass strip southwest of the city, in the soybeans, with a farmer who would leave the gate open and a lantern on a post if he was asked nicely and not paid. He said the boy would need to be at the gate by eleven, and not to bring more than a backpack, because the left bay was going to be full of loud car and the right bay was going to be full of square truck and he was not putting a suitcase on the flight deck after what happened with the cello.

"What happened with the cello?"

"Never you mind," said Ruiz. "Wednesday. Four o'clock. Bring the green thing."

---

The plane lived inland at the small airfield behind the hills, in an old crop-duster hangar. On Wednesday afternoon it sat half in and half out of the shade with its two bay doors open underneath it like the gill covers of some enormous patient fish.

The square truck was already in the right bay under its gray cover. It had been rebuilt again over the spring, by the son and by Eight together, at weekends, after a winter of storm roads and tangerine tracks in Korea had shaken half its welds loose: the son had done the welding himself this time, with his father standing beside him passing tools and saying nothing at all, which the son had told his mother afterward was the most frightening hour of his life. The chipped 8 on the driver's door was still chipped. Nobody had suggested painting it.

The green-gray car went into the left bay under its own power, at walking pace, with Eight at the wheel and Ruiz stepping backward ahead of it with his hands up and his fingers beckoning, humming. It went up the ramp with its exhaust muttering and popping on the overrun, and at the top it did not hesitate the way the little white car had the year before; it went in like a dog going into its own kennel, square and sure, and stopped on the marks, and Eight cut the engine and the sound of it went on ringing in the hollow of the bay for a second after it was gone.

Ruiz set the chocks and ran the straps, then backed off a pace to look the car over with his hands on his hips, a short, broad man with a gray mustache and a faded cap, who had flown Eight to more places than either of them would ever list.

"Ford," he said.

"Ford."

"Seventy-seven?"

"Seventy-seven."

"My uncle had one in Guadalajara. Blue. Not like this one." Ruiz crouched to peer beneath the tail of it at the axle, at the fat exhaust, at the skid plate beneath the sump bolted on with a row of countersunk heads. "Not anything like this one. His went to the market and back. This one looks like it wants to fight somebody."

"It wants to go up a mountain on gravel."

"That's the same thing." Ruiz straightened. "Who built it?"

"Somebody who doesn't want to be thanked."

"That's everybody who builds your things." Ruiz walked round to the nose of the plane and patted it, absently, the way you would pat the neck of a horse that had stood still while you saddled it. "Somebody who doesn't want to be thanked put fuel in the tanks at Gander the last three times, and somebody who doesn't want to be thanked left the gate open in Hokkaido, and somebody who doesn't want to be thanked told the tower in Ulan-Ude we were a weather flight. One of these days," he said, "I'd like to meet one of them. Just to see if they've got faces."

"They have faces."

"I'll take your word for it."

---

His wife drove him to the airfield. She did not usually. Usually he drove himself, alone, early, and the goodbyes happened at the kitchen door with the coffee. But this time she had picked up the keys from the hook before he could, and he had understood, and said nothing, and got into the passenger side.

She drove the coast road with her elbow on the sill, the fog lying off the coast like a second shoreline and the eucalyptus giving off their medicine smell in the heat. They did not talk for the first ten miles. It was the kind of not-talking they had perfected over thirty years, comfortable and full, like a room with all the furniture in it.

"I read the letter again," she said, at the turn inland.

He waited.

"My aunt's. The one with my name on it." She kept her eyes on the road. "I read it to you in December. On the porch. All of it."

"I remember."

"I've decided I'm not going to ask you anything about it." She changed down for the hill, smoothly. "I want you to know that I decided. It isn't that I didn't think of it. I thought of it every day from Christmas to Easter. And then I decided." The road climbed through the oaks. "Some things you're given aren't for asking about. They're for going on with."

He looked at her profile against the window, against the gold hills going past, and could not think of anything to say that was as good as what she had already said, so he said nothing, and after a mile she reached across without looking and put her hand over his on the seat between them for a while, and then took it back to change gear.

At the hangar she did not get out of the car. She leaned across and kissed him and said, "The rain," and he said, "Before the rain," and she said, "You always say that," and drove away down the hill with her arm out of the window, lifted once, not looking back, which was how she had always done it, since the first time.

---

They took off at a quarter past four into a sky that was clear inland and white over the sea.

Eight sat in the right seat of the flight deck for the climb, as he always did, watching Ruiz fly. Ruiz flew the way some old men drove: without any visible effort at all, one hand loosely on the yoke, the other on his knee or adjusting the trim with a thumb, humming. The plane lifted off the end of the runway with its full weight under it, heavier than most planes its size had any right to be, and climbed in a long, shallow, patient arc over the brown hills, and turned east. Below them the valley opened out, green and gold, and beyond it the mountains came up in granite and pine.

By dark they were over the desert. By midnight they were over the plains, with the towns below them in small isolated clusters of orange light, like coals someone had scattered across a black floor and walked away from.

At ten to one in the morning, Ruiz put the airplane down on a grass strip in a sea of soybeans southwest of Chicago, by the light of a single lantern on a fence post and the plane's own landing lights, with a long soft bounce and a hiss of wet grass under the gear, and rolled to a stop a hundred meters from the gate.

The son was standing at the gate with his backpack on one shoulder and a cardboard box in his arms.

He came across the grass in the landing lights, squinting, the box held in front of him as if it were something alive. Eight came down the steps to meet him. They did not embrace; they never had at airfields, not since the son was small. The son simply stopped in front of his father and held out the box.

"Mrs. Margaríti sent this," he said. "For the flight. She said you'd be hungry and too proud to say so."

Eight lifted the lid. The smell came up out of the box in the cold field like a door opening in a warm house: sesame and orange and honey, and something underneath, aniseed. Inside, packed in waxed paper, were rings of bread crusted with sesame, small and hard and shining; two dozen biscuits twisted into plaits; and a square of something dense and dark, wrapped separately, with a note on top in blue ink, in a hand Eight had last seen on the back of a postcard.

The son translated it, there in the landing lights, with the soybeans ticking in the wind.

"She says this is figs from the island's way of keeping them, dried and pressed with walnuts and aniseed into a cake, and that it keeps for a month, and that you should eat it over the sea and not before, because it's for the sea." He looked up. "And she says, tell the father: the water is still there. Under the fence. She can hear it from here."

Eight closed the box.

From the flight deck, Ruiz leaned out of the side window and called down into the night that if the boy and his father were planning on standing in a farmer's field holding pastries until the sun came up, he would like to be informed, so that he could go back to sleep.

They went up the steps. Behind them, at the gate, the farmer who owned the field, whom neither of them had seen, came out of the dark of the soybeans, lifted the lantern off its post, and carried it away.

Over Gander

Kept private.

*My wife told me yesterday, in the car, that she has decided not to ask. She said it the way she says most important things, in the middle of changing gear. I have been married to her for thirty-one years and have never once lied to her, and I have never once told her everything, and until yesterday I did not know which of those two facts she had been weighing. Now I know she weighed them both, for four months, alone, and chose. I have been given a great many things by people who did not want to be thanked. This is the largest. I do not know where to put it.*

---

They stopped for fuel at Gander in the dark, a little after five in the morning, local time, and nobody came out to the airplane except a man in a red parka with a fuel truck.

The son watched him from the flight deck window. The man did not look up at the windows. He did not come to the door. He backed the truck up to the wing, unrolled the hose, climbed the ladder, and stood on the wing in the floodlight with the nozzle in his hand and the wind pulling at the hood of his parka, looking out across the black airfield toward the east, where there was no light at all yet, only the cold. When the tanks were full he climbed down, rolled up the hose, and drove away. Nothing was signed. No paper changed hands. Ruiz, in the left seat, lifted two fingers from the yoke as the truck went past the nose, and in the cab of the truck, briefly, two fingers lifted from the wheel.

"Who was that?"

"The man in the red parka," said Ruiz.

"Does he have a name?"

"Probably." Ruiz began the checklist. "He has a daughter who was very sick once, and a hospital in Boston that didn't charge for it, and nobody at the hospital could ever tell him why. That's all I know. That's all I've ever wanted to know." He looked at the son over the top of his glasses. "You're writing that down."

The son looked at the notebook on his knee. He had been.

"Don't," said Ruiz. "Some things you keep in your head. That way if anyone asks to see the notebook, there's nothing in it but the weather."

The son closed the notebook.

They took off into a wind straight off the North Atlantic that shoved at the wings and made the whole long body of the plane shiver as it climbed, and turned east, and the lights of Gander went down behind them like a handful of sparks dropped into a bucket of ink, and then there was nothing below but the dark and the sea.

---

He went back to the cabin when the sun came up.

The cabin was small and plain: four seats that folded flat, a table, a galley the size of a wardrobe, and a door at the back that led down a short ladder to the walkway between the bays. His father was at the table with a binder open in front of him and a mug of coffee going cold. The box from the bakery was open beside the binder. One of the sesame rings had been eaten. The cake of figs had not been touched.

"She said over the sea," his father said, without looking up. "We're over the sea now. I was waiting for you."

The son sat down across from him. His father took a knife out of the galley drawer and cut the fig cake into thin slices, dark and dense, the knife going through it with a sound like cutting a block of wet sand, and the smell came up: fig, and the bitter edge of walnut, and aniseed, and something like wine.

They ate it looking out at the Atlantic, a hammered sheet of gray and silver with the sun coming up out of a bank of cloud like a coal being blown on.

"It tastes like September," the son said.

"It is September." His father turned the binder round so the son could see it. "This is the rally."

It was a map of an island.

It was the shape, roughly, of a hand with the fingers closed: a long body running from southwest to northeast, with a blunt thumb pushed out toward the north and a deep bay cut into the south side between the thumb and the palm. The bay was labeled *Skála*, with a small cross-hatch for the harbor and a smaller one, a little inland, for the village of *Kryovrýsi*, high on a slope. All over the island ran a red line, broken into sections, each section numbered. One went straight up from the harbor in a tangle of switchbacks to the village and beyond. One went along the whole north coast, the top of the closed fingers, and ended at a lighthouse on the farthest point. One went down through the middle of the island in a long, wandering series of curves, through something the map called *Pezoúles*, and ended in a valley with a stream in it and a row of small symbols like the teeth of a comb.

"Watermills," his father said, putting his finger on the comb. "Eleven of them, on one stream. Stone, eighteenth and nineteenth century. Most have no roofs. The stream turned them all, one after the other, the same water used eleven times on its way to the sea." He moved his finger up the valley to a small blue dot at its head, under the village. "That's the spring. The Mána. It feeds the stream. And the terraces. And the fountain your Mrs. Margaríti washed her hair in. And the village. Every drop of fresh water on that island comes out of one hill, through one hole, in one place."

"And somebody's put a fence round it."

"Somebody's put a pump in it." His father turned a page. There was a photograph, printed out, of a squat concrete block on a hillside among dead terraces, with a steel door and a black pipe running out of it and down the hill. "Since April. It takes the water out at the source, before it reaches the fountain, before it reaches the channels. It pipes it four kilometers along the coast to a building that used to be the island's olive press. They're putting it in bottles there. And they're piping the rest to a hotel that isn't built yet, on the point by the lighthouse, for its swimming pools."

"Can they do that?"

"Apparently they own it."

The son looked at the photograph of the pumphouse for a while. On his phone, in the family tree Maureen had let him into, the Margarítis branch went back on that one hillside further than anyone could read. "Stav's dad says the family's terraces have been in the family since before Greece was Greece," he said. "Since the 1790s. He says everybody's have. He says nobody ever sold anything. Who did they buy it from?"

"That," said his father, "is the question." He turned another page. This one was not a map or a photograph. It was a printout of a web page, in Greek, from a government site: a form with boxes, and in one of the boxes a long number, and in another a name, *ASKYRA SPRINGS S.A.*, and in another a word his father had underlined in pencil. "This is the new land register. Greece has been building one for thirty years. A national map of who owns every piece of land in the country, parcel by parcel, with a number for each. Before it, a great deal of land on the islands was owned the old way. By families. By memory. By who had always farmed it and whose father had. By a deed in a drawer, if you were lucky. By nothing at all, if you weren't."

"And when they made the map—"

"When they made the map, everybody was supposed to come forward and declare what they owned. With documents. By a date." His father tapped the underlined word. "If you were in Chicago, or Melbourne, or Johannesburg, and you didn't know, or you didn't have the papers, or your papers were a sentence in your grandfather's handwriting on the back of a wedding photograph, you didn't come forward. And if somebody else came forward instead, with papers that looked better than yours, the map put their name on your land."

"That's—" The son stopped. "That can't just stand."

"It can be challenged. In court. Up to a final date. After that, the first registration becomes the truth, and the truth is very hard to argue with." His father closed the binder. "For that island, and that parcel, after more than one extension, the last day to file is the thirtieth of this month."

"Three weeks."

"A little more."

The son sat back. Far below, a container ship was heading west, its wake a white thread drawn across the blue.

"Mrs. Margaríti didn't know any of this," he said. "Or if she did, she didn't say. She just wrote down the hours."

"She wrote down what she knew. That's always the right thing to do first." His father picked up his coffee, found it cold, and drank it anyway. "Somewhere on that island there's a book. There has to be. Places that share water by the hour for two hundred years write the hours down, because people die, and people argue, and the shadows on a hillside move a little every century as the trees grow. Someone kept a book. Find out who kept it, and where it is now."

"You think it's been taken."

"I think if it hadn't been taken, nobody would have needed to come forward with better papers." His father put the mug down. "That's your work. Not mine. You'll be living in the houses. You'll hear about the book in a kitchen before I'd hear about it in a year."

---

They did not talk for a while after that. The son slept, for an hour, curled across two seats with his backpack under his head, and woke to find a blanket over him that had not been there before and his father still at the table, writing in pencil in the margins of the rally map, very small.

The son sat up.

"Can I ask you something?"

"Go on."

"I asked Granddad. In December. Like you said." The son pulled the blanket round his shoulders. "About the seven. On the trunk. About the stranger who helped our family."

His father's pencil stopped.

"What did he say?"

"He said, 'Not yet.'" The son looked out of the window. "And then he said, 'When you've given away something you wanted to keep, come back and ask me again.' And then he went to sleep in his chair. Or pretended to."

His father put the pencil down.

He did not say anything for some time. The son watched his face and saw it go quiet, the way a pond goes quiet when the wind drops. Then his father leaned back in his seat and turned toward the window and the blue beyond it, and when he spoke his voice was quieter than usual, and slower, as if he were reading the words off something a long way away.

"When I was a few years older than you," he said, "I thought this was about winning. Races, I mean. And the other thing. I thought if you were fast enough and clever enough you could go into a place and put it right, the way you put a car right, and come out again, and be finished. I was very good at it. I was very proud." He paused. "Your grandfather told me that I had misunderstood. He said I was not supposed to be the one who wins. He said I was supposed to be the one who arrives. Who comes up the road when the people there have already started, and have already done the hard part, and only need someone from outside to hold the door at the right moment. And then goes away again, so that what they've done is theirs."

"The passer-by," said the son.

His father looked at him.

"Mrs. Margaríti's hour," the son said. "No one owns it. It's for whoever comes."

His father did not answer that. He looked at the son a little longer, and the son could not read his face at all, and then his father reached into the inside pocket of his jacket, which hung on the back of the seat, and took out something, and put it on the table between them.

It was a plain white card, the size of a playing card, blank on both sides.

"I've never shown you where these come from," his father said. "Not all of it. You've seen your grandfather draw some, and you've drawn one. But the cards themselves. The plane. The fuel at Gander. The car from the woman in Cumbria. The gate in the soybeans." He turned the card over with one finger. "I don't pay for all of it. I could. I pay for a great deal of it. But not all. There are people who give, and who want it used, and who don't want to be the ones using it. Some of them are rich. Most of them aren't. The man in the red parka isn't. They give it to me because they know I'll put it where it's needed, and that I'll never say where it came from." He looked up. "That's the part I wanted you to know. It isn't mine. Most of what I do with isn't mine. I'm the hand, a lot of the time. I'm not the purse."

The son looked at the white card.

"Why are you telling me now?"

"Because you asked your grandfather," said his father, "and he said not yet. And I think he's right. But I don't want you to think the not-yet is a secret about money. It isn't. The money is the least of it." He pushed the card across the table. "And because there's something else you should hear from me before you hear it from anyone else, and it's this. You can say no. To any of it. Ever. Tomorrow or in twenty years. You don't owe it to anyone. Not to me. Not to your grandfather. If you say no, I'll be exactly as proud of you as I am now, which is more than I've ever said, and I'm saying it over the water because your grandfather told me to."

The son looked at him.

Then he picked up the card, and put it in the back of the notebook, between the last page and the cover, and closed the notebook, and did not write anything down.

---

They put down again at Santa Maria in the Azores a little after noon, and Ruiz slept on the folded seats through the afternoon while the tanks were filled, and at dusk they went on east.

The message came in over the satellite link two hours out from the Greek coast.

Ruiz called it back through the open cabin door: "Something for you. Text. No number I know." His father went forward. The son followed him. On the small screen in the center of the panel, among the instruments, there were five lines, in Greek and then in English, as if the writer had wanted to be sure.

*I see from the entry list you have no co-driver. A rally without one is a walk. I read pace notes for twenty years, in forests in Greece and in Cyprus and once at the Acropolis, a long time ago. I also read land registers for thirty years, for the state, in Athens, until I retired. I think you need both. I do not want my name on anything, not on the car and not anywhere else. I will be on the quay at Ermoupoli at seven. Gray hair, red jacket. — I.*

His father read it twice.

"Do you know who it is?" the son said.

"No." His father looked at the screen a little longer. "But I know who she knows. Somebody told her where to look." He sent back a single word, in Greek, which the son did not know, and later looked up and found meant *Thank you*, and which, when he asked his father about it, his father said he had sent because he could not help himself, and because she would forgive him for it once.

---

They came down over the Aegean in the first gray light.

The son had never seen it. He pressed his face to the flight deck window behind Ruiz's seat and watched it come up out of the dawn: not a sea so much as a floor of dark blue silk, wrinkled very finely all over by a wind from the north, and scattered across it, near and far, in every direction, islands. Brown and bare and humped, like sleeping cattle standing chest-deep in a pond, some of them with a white village spilled down a slope like salt from a broken bag, some with nothing at all on them but a single white speck that might have been a chapel or a house or a sheep. The wind was writing white lines on the sea, everywhere, all of them running the same way, southward. The light came up ahead of them out of Asia and touched the tops of the islands first, so that each one lit from the summit down, gold, then pink, then white, like candles lit one after another across a dark room.

"That big one," said Ruiz, pointing with his chin. "That's Tinos. The long one past it, Andros. That one there, low, that's Mykonos." He pointed ahead. "And that, with the town that looks like somebody dropped a wedding cake on a hill, that's Syros. That's us."

Ermoupoli came up out of the sea at them, a great amphitheater of houses stacked on two hills above a harbor, pale ochre and rose and white, with a church on each of its two summits, and the cranes of a shipyard at the water's edge with a ship in dry dock, and the whole town catching the first sun like a face turned toward a window.

The runway was very short. It lay across a dry valley behind the town, between stony hills, with a fence of oleanders along one side and a hill waiting at the far end. Ruiz put the plane on the first meter of it as if he were setting a glass down on a table, and braked, and the whole long heavy body of the plane groaned and shuddered and slowed, and slowed, and stopped, with more runway left over than the son had expected and less than he would have liked.

There was no one on the apron. The tower, a small square building with a glass top, was dark except for a single window, where a man in a white shirt was drinking coffee. He lifted the cup as they taxied past, and turned away.

"Another one with a face," said Ruiz, and shut down the engines.

The Landing Craft

For anyone who asks.

*In a rally the person in the right-hand seat reads the road to you before you can see it. She has driven it slowly, days before, and written it down in a language of numbers and short words, and now she reads it aloud at speed, a little ahead of the car, so that you are always steering into a corner you have only heard about. People call it trust. It is something stranger than trust. For a few hours you agree to live in her voice instead of your own eyes. I have had seven co-drivers in my life. I remember every one of their voices better than their faces.*

---

She was on the quay at seven, exactly as she had said, in a red jacket zipped to the chin against the wind, with gray hair cut short as a boy's and a canvas bag over one shoulder, and she was the only person on the whole long marble waterfront who was not doing anything at all.

Ermoupoli was waking up around her. Men were sorting red mullet and bream into crates on the quay, and a waiter was hosing down the marble in front of a café under the arcades. Behind the waterfront, the town went up and up, street above street of tall pale houses with green shutters and iron balconies and roofs of faded red tile, so close together they looked like one building that had been folded many times, and on the summit of each of the two hills sat a church, a blue dome on one and a pale bell tower on the other, with the sun on both. The air smelled of diesel and salt and frying dough, because a man with a cart at the corner of the square was making the little honey fritters people ate in the morning with coffee, and the smoke of his oil drifted out over the harbor.

She watched them come down the quay, Eight and the son, from the taxi rank, and did not move toward them. She let them come to her.

Up close she was sixty-seven or so, small and very straight, with a face browned and creased like a walnut and eyes so pale a gray they were almost silver. She looked at Eight first, a quick look, up and down and done, the look of someone checking a tire. Then she looked at the son, longer.

"Your son," she said in English.

"Yes."

"He has your silence. Not yet your face." She held out her hand to Eight, then to the son. Her grip was dry and hard. "Iríni. That is all, Iríni. If anyone asks, I am a retired woman from Athens who likes old cars and came to watch the rally, and you were kind enough to let me sit in yours, because your co-driver is ill. Your co-driver has a terrible flu. He is very sad to miss it."

"I'm sorry to hear it," said Eight gravely.

"So am I. He was very good." She hitched the bag on her shoulder. "Manólis is waiting at the end of the mole with the boat. He is not happy, because the wind is getting up, and he wants to cross before it does. Where are your cars?"

"Coming down from the airfield now. On the road."

"Then let's go and make Manólis happier," said Iríni, and turned, and walked away down the quay toward the end of the harbor without looking back to see whether they followed.

---

The boat was not a ferry. It was a landing craft: a squat, square, rust-streaked steel hull, forty meters long, open to the sky amidships, with a wheelhouse perched on the stern like a box on the back of a truck and a great flat ramp at the bow that came down onto the concrete of the slipway with a clang that made the gulls lift. It was the kind of boat that carried cement mixers and water tankers between the small islands the big ferries did not trouble with. On its bow, in white letters on blue, it said its name, which was *ANEMÓNI*, with a second word after it that had been painted out.

Kapetán Manólis stood at the top of the ramp in a sleeveless vest with his arms folded. He was about sixty, with a belly like a barrel and arms like hams and a white mustache stained yellow at the center, and he watched the square truck come down the hill from the airfield and along the waterfront and onto the slipway with an expression of profound personal grievance.

Then the green-gray car came behind it, at walking pace, with its exhaust burbling and popping off the walls of the warehouses, and his face changed.

"*Po po po,*" he said, which the son would learn later was the sound people in this country made the way people at home said *wow*. "An Escort. A real one?"

"A real one," said Eight, climbing out.

The captain came down the ramp. He walked all the way round the car. He bent and looked at the wheels, at the arches, at the exhaust, at the skid plate under the sump. He put his face down beside the driver's window and looked in at the cage, at the two thin seats, at the stubby gear lever standing up out of the tunnel.

"In 1980," he said, straightening, in English that had been learned on ships, "I am twenty. I am on a hill in the mountains for the Acropolis. All night we wait for the cars. Then, in the morning, Vatanen. In an Escort. White, with blue. He comes over the crest so fast, the car is in the air, I see the sky under the wheels." He spread his hands, the full width of the landing craft. "Then it lands. And the dust. And the noise." He shook his head. "Forty-six years I do not forget the noise. Make it make the noise."

Eight got back in. He started it. The engine coughed and caught and barked, and he held it at four thousand, and the sound went off the steel walls of the landing craft and the stone walls of the warehouses and up into the stacked town like a shout in a stairwell, and every fisherman on the quay stood up from his crates and looked.

Kapetán Manólis closed his eyes.

When the engine stopped, he opened them. He said nothing more. He walked back up the ramp, and turned at the top, and waved them on, both arms, as if he were bringing a ship into harbor.

---

They crossed in three hours, northeast, into the wind.

The son stood in the bow by the raised ramp, and every few minutes the spray came over it in a white sheet and soaked him to the waist and he did not care at all. The sea was a blue he had never seen, not the green-gray of the Pacific at home, not the black-green off Jeju, but a blue so deep it looked lit from underneath. The wind was steady and enormous, and it came from the north. Iríni, standing beside him with her jacket zipped to her nose, told him its name.

"*Meltémi,*" she said. "The summer wind. It is strongest in July and August, it blows until September, sometimes three days, sometimes nine, from the north, always from the north. In the old days the boats could not go to Athens against it. Whole islands sat and waited." She squinted at the horizon. "It is late this year, and it is tired. It will stop soon. Then, in a week, two weeks, the first rain."

"Mrs. Margaríti said the water was still there. Under the fence."

"Of course it is still there. Water does not read." Iríni looked at him sideways. "You are the one who recorded her. Your father told me in the truck. He said you have thirty-one old people in a box."

"In a laptop."

"Same thing." She turned back to the sea. "I had a grandmother from Asia Minor. From Smyrna. She came in 1922, in a boat, with nothing, like everybody. For fifty years she told me stories and I did not listen, because I was young and I was going to drive in rallies and be famous. Then she died, and I have one photograph and a recipe for meatballs with cumin that I do not make right." She shrugged. "So. You have thirty-one. That is thirty-one more than I have."

They went past Tinos on their left, very close, a long high island with a bare spine and white villages strung along its slopes, and among the villages, scattered over the hillsides, small white towers, square, with patterned tops like lace cut out of stone.

"Dovecotes," Iríni said, before he could ask. "For pigeons. People say the Venetians brought them. Tinos has more than a thousand. Askýra has two hundred. Each one, a family. You look at the pattern on the top and you know whose it is. Triangles, diamonds, suns, little trees. My co-driver who has the flu would tell you they are the most beautiful buildings in Greece. I think they are just for pigeons."

The son looked back at the towers going by on their white hillsides, with the patterns cut into their upper walls in slate laid edge-on, sharp black against the white, so the light came through, and did not believe her for a second.

---

Askýra came up out of the sea at a little after ten.

It rose from the water in a long, steep, bare ridge, the tawny color of a lion's back, with the wind combing the scrub flat along the crest.

Then the landing craft came round the blunt eastern point into the lee of the land, and the wind dropped away all at once, as if someone had shut a window, and the bay opened in front of them, and the son saw the valley.

It ran down from the heart of the island to the harbor in a long, deep fold, and the whole of it, from the floor of the fold to the high ridges on either side, was stepped. Terraces, hundreds of them, thousands, row above row above row, each held up by a dry-stone wall the height of a man, following the curve of the slope exactly, so that the whole valley looked like a contour map that someone had built out of stone at full size. The walls were gray-gold in the sun. On the steps between them, there should have been green. He could see where the green had been. Here and there on the higher terraces there were still olive trees, gray-silver, and figs, dark and broad-leaved, and a few rows of something staked on canes. But on most of the steps the ground was bare and pale and cracked, and the vines were brown, and on some of the lower terraces the plants had dried where they stood and been left standing, a whole field of tomato stalks gone the color of paper.

Down the very center of the valley, following the stream bed, ran a thread of darker green: plane trees, a long line of them, with the white shapes of ruined buildings between them, square and roofless. The watermills. The trees were still green. But even from the sea, the son could see the pale stripe of the stream bed under them, stones and dry gravel, no glint of water anywhere.

High on the left side of the valley, perched on a spur where the terraces began, a village: white cubes stacked against the slope, a few blue doors, a few walls the color of ochre, a single tall tree rising out of the middle of them. And just below the village, at the head of the valley, where the green line of the plane trees began, the son could see a small square of new gray concrete, sharp-edged, and a fence glinting around it.

He did not need anyone to tell him what it was.

Below the valley lay the harbor. A crescent of white houses around a small curved bay, a stone mole with a light at the end of it, a strip of beach. A dozen fishing boats rode at their moorings inside the mole, and they were the first thing on the whole island that made him smile. They were wooden. They were broad and round-bellied, with high pointed bows and a curving sheer, and they were painted. Every one of them was painted in bands of two or three colors, the colors of the island made brighter: ochre and blue and deep green, a rust red, a yellow like an egg yolk. Their reflections lay under them on the flat water of the harbor, wavering, so that every boat seemed to float on a painting of itself.

At the far end of the harbor, beyond the last houses, there was a gap in the waterfront where a stone slipway ran down into the sea, and on it, propped on timbers, stood the bare ribs of a boat. Only ribs: a keel, and the curved frames rising from it like the fingers of two hands about to catch something. Beside it, in a wide, open-fronted shed with a corrugated roof, there were other boats, hauled out, and stacks of timber, and a man.

He was standing on the slipway, beside the ribs, looking at the landing craft coming in. He was old and very thin, in a white shirt with the sleeves rolled up, and he had a pencil behind his ear, and he did not wave.

"That is Barba Lefterís," said Iríni. "Gavalás. The last man on this island who builds caiques. *Barba* means uncle, but not your uncle. Everybody's uncle. It is what you call an old man you respect." She glanced at Eight, who had come up to the bow and was standing behind them. "Your car is going to live with him. In the boatyard. His granddaughter arranged it with the teacher, who arranged it with the boy's family in Chicago, who arranged it with the boy." She looked at the son. "Who apparently arranged it with everybody."

"I just asked," said the son.

"That is how everything on an island is arranged," said Iríni. "Somebody just asks. And then three hundred people know."

---

The landing craft came alongside the end of the mole and dropped its ramp onto the concrete with a crash that sent every cat on the waterfront running.

The square truck went off first, and then the green-gray car, and Eight drove it along the waterfront at walking pace, past the kafeneío with its blue chairs and its old men under the tamarisk tree who stopped talking and turned their chairs round to watch, past the bakery and the small market and the house with the octopuses hung out on a line to dry like gray washing, to the far end of the harbor and up onto the concrete apron of the boatyard, where the old man was waiting.

Barba Lefterís Gavalás looked at the car. He looked at it the way the captain had, all the way round, slowly. But where the captain had looked at the wheels and the exhaust, the old man looked at the body: at the line of the roof, the curve of the arches, the way the panels met.

Then he looked at Eight.

"*Kalós írthes,*" he said. Welcome. Literally, the son would learn later: *You came well.*

He said something else, in Greek, to Iríni, and pointed with his pencil at the shed, and walked away into it.

"He says there is room by the *trechantíri*," Iríni translated. "The double-ended boat on the left. He says to put the car there, not too close, because the paint on the boat is still wet, and the car is the same color as the inside of his granddaughter's tin of green and he does not want her getting ideas." She paused. "And he says the car is a good shape. He says it is a working shape. He says it looks like a boat that decided to stay on land."

The son wrote that down. He did not care what Ruiz said. Some things you had to keep on paper.

Above them, high on the slope at the head of the valley, the new concrete square sat in its fence among the dead terraces, very quiet, and from somewhere inside it, faint, carried down the dry stream bed on the last of the wind, came a sound none of them noticed yet: the steady, patient hum of a pump.

The House under the Third Terrace

Kept private.

*At midnight I walked up the stream bed under the plane trees as far as the fourth mill. The stones were dry. Not damp underneath, which is how a stream sleeps in summer. Dry all the way down. There were frogs in the pools a month ago, the man at the kafeneío says. Now there are no pools. I stood in the mill race of a building that ground this island's bread for two hundred years and listened, and I could hear the pump at the top of the valley, very faintly, like a refrigerator in another room. I have heard that sound before, in other places. It is the sound of something being taken slowly, so that no one will look up.*

---

The ferry came in on Saturday at four in the afternoon, an hour late, a big white ship with a yawning stern and a bow that opened, and the whole of Skála came down to the harbor to watch it, because the ferry came three times a week and nobody on the island had ever, in living memory, failed to come down and see who got off.

The son stood on the mole with Pávlos Kalavrós, the schoolteacher, and watched the passengers come down the ramp among trucks and motorbikes: a woman with a crate of chickens, two lost backpackers, a tall old man with a white beard and a black coat, walking very carefully, who turned out to be the island's retired vet, coming back from his daughter's in Piraeus with a new hip. And then, at the end of the crowd, two people the son knew.

Kóstas Margarítis came down the ramp with a suitcase in each hand and the expression of a man walking into cold water. He stopped at the bottom. He set down the suitcases. He looked up the valley, at the terraces, at the village on its spur, at the plane trees down the dry stream, and he did not move for so long that a truck behind him sounded its horn, and he did not hear it.

Behind him, his son Stav came down the ramp with a violin case on his back and his phone held up at arm's length, filming everything, the harbor, the boats, the mole, his father's back. He saw the son and grinned and waved the phone. Then he looked past him, up the valley, and the grin went away, and he lowered the phone.

"That's it?" he said, when he reached them. "That's the — that's where she's from? All of that?"

"All of that," said Pávlos, in good careful English. "Every step. Your family has three. The third terrace under the village, and two below it. I will show you." He held out his hand to Stav, and then to Kóstas, who had at last picked up his suitcases. "*Kalós orísate.* Welcome. I am the teacher. I have seven pupils, and you are now eight, I think, because you will have many things to learn and I will have to teach you all of them."

Kóstas shook his hand and could not speak. The teacher saw it, and said something to him in Greek, low, and Kóstas nodded, and they walked up the mole together, the teacher carrying one of the suitcases, and the son and Stav fell in behind.

"He's been weird since Athens," Stav said, under his breath. "On the ferry he went out on the deck for like three hours and just stood there. He didn't even eat. My dad. Who eats." He shifted the violin case on his back. "He came here once when he was eleven. With Pappoús. He said he doesn't remember anything except the smell of the fig trees and a man who threw an octopus at a rock. Like, on purpose. Over and over."

"To tenderize it," said the son. "They still do it. I saw a man this morning."

Stav looked at him. "You've been here since yesterday and you already know stuff."

"I don't know anything," said the son. "I just watched the man with the octopus."

---

The house under the third terrace was at the bottom of the village, where the street gave up being a street and became a stair, and the stair went down between whitewashed walls and stopped at a blue door.

It was small. It was two rooms, one above the other, built into the slope so that you came in at the top from the stair and went down inside to the lower room, and the lower room had a door of its own onto the terrace below. The walls were a meter thick, whitewashed inside and out, so many times over so many years that the corners had gone soft and round like the corners of a bar of soap. The ceiling of the upper room was made of thin dark poles laid side by side, and over the poles a layer of flattened reeds, and over the reeds, the son would learn, a layer of seaweed and a layer of packed earth, and the flat roof on top. There was a fireplace with a hood shaped like a bell, a carved bed, a table, two chairs, and on the wall, in a frame, a photograph of a young man and a young woman standing side by side in front of this same blue door, not smiling, in their best clothes, very stiff, and between them, held in both their hands, a single round loaf of bread with a pattern pressed into its crust.

"That's them," Kóstas said. They were his first words since the harbor. "That's Mama and Papa. The day before the wedding. 1962." He took the frame off the wall and looked at it. "She's never shown me this one. We have a different one. In Chicago. In color. In a studio." He held it closer to the light from the door. "She's so young."

"She is twenty," said a voice from the stair.

A woman came down into the room, wiping her hands on an apron, a short square woman of about fifty with her hair tied up in a scarf and reading glasses hanging on a cord. She looked at Kóstas, and at the photograph in his hands, and her face did something that the son had seen on the faces of old women in the senior lunch on Halsted, when someone said the name of a village.

"I am Pópi," she said. "Kalliópi Lambrou. My mother was your mother's cousin. I keep the shop, and I keep the key. Thirty years I come here every week and open the windows so the house can breathe." She took the frame from Kóstas, gently, and hung it back on its nail. "I sent her the photograph of the fence. On the tablet. In April." Her mouth went tight. "I am sorry. I should not have sent it. She is eighty-four. I sent her the fence."

"She'd have found out," Kóstas said.

"Yes. But not from me." Pópi went to the window and pushed the shutters open, and the evening came into the room: the light, gold and slanting, and the sound of swallows, and the smell of dry earth and thyme and somewhere, faintly, figs. "She wrote you a card. She told me on the tablet. She said she gave it to a boy." She turned round and looked at the son. "This boy?"

"I mailed it to my father," the son said.

"And your father came."

"He came for the rally."

Pópi looked at him a moment longer, through the glasses she had put on at some point without his noticing.

"Of course," she said. "The rally." And went back up the stair to put the kettle on.

---

They ate that night on the terrace below the house, at a table Pópi carried down the outside steps with the help of her husband, a silent man with enormous hands who ran the island's one garage and whose name, the son discovered at the end of the evening, was also Kóstas, which caused confusion for the remainder of their stay that nobody ever resolved.

The terrace was the first of the family's three: a strip of earth twelve meters wide and sixty long, held up by a wall of fitted stone, and along its uphill side, under the next wall, a channel. It was cut into the rock at the foot of the wall, and lined with flat stones, and it was a hand's width wide and a hand's width deep, and it ran the whole length of the terrace on a slope so gentle the son could not see it with his eye, only feel it, when he set a dry fig leaf in it at one end and nudged it with his toe, and watched it drift, very slowly, toward the other end, where the channel turned and went down through a small square hole in the outer wall to the terrace below.

There was no water in it. There had been none since April.

"Six hours," Pópi said, standing beside him. "Every week, six hours, the water came down this channel. From the Mána, through the big channel along the top of the village, and then, at the hour, the warden lifted a stone here" — she pointed to a slot at the uphill end of the channel, where a flat stone stood upright in a groove — "and the water came in. Your family's hours. Then at the end of the hours, he dropped the stone again, and the water went on to the next family. All week. Two hundred years." She folded her arms. "Now the warden sits in the kafeneío with nothing to do, and the stone stands there like a gravestone."

On the terrace there was a fig tree, old and huge, its trunk twisted like a wrung cloth, its leaves the size of plates and still green, because its roots went down, Pópi said, through the stones into the rock, and found what the tomatoes could not. Under it the ground was soft with fallen figs, purple-black, split open, and the wasps were drunk on them. There were three olive trees, gray and silver. And there were the dead things: rows of stakes with tomato vines dried to paper on them, a bed of beans gone brown and brittle, two lines of melons the size of fists that had stopped growing in June and simply sat there, shrunk, like stones that had once had hope.

They ate fáva, a soft yellow purée of split peas, piled in a shallow dish with a well of green oil in the middle and raw red onion chopped over the top and a scatter of capers that Pópi said she had picked off the rocks of the north coast herself, in May, and salted in a jar. They ate small fried fish, head and all, which Stav ate with deep suspicion and then asked for more of, and lopsided tomatoes from the high terraces, kept alive with cans of water from the cistern under the garage, broken over with hard rusks that drank the juice and the oil. There was wine, cloudy and amber, from Pópi's husband's barrel. And there were figs, from the tree over their heads, which Pópi reached up and picked as the evening went on and set on the table one at a time, still warm from the sun.

Halfway through the meal, the teacher came down the steps from the village with a tablet under his arm.

"Six o'clock," he said. "It is ten in the morning in Chicago. She asked me to come."

He stood the tablet in its folding leather case at the end of the table, among the plates, and the screen lit, and there, in her kitchen above the bakery, in her cardigan, with the window behind her and the noise of Halsted coming through it, was Fotiní Margaríti.

She studied the screen and said nothing at first.

Then she said, in Greek, very clearly, "Turn me round. I want to see the terrace."

Pávlos turned the tablet. He held it up and walked it slowly along the terrace, past the fig tree and the olives and the dead tomatoes and the dry channel, to the wall at the end, and held it out over the wall so that she could see down the valley: the terraces falling away below in their gray-gold steps, the line of plane trees along the stream bed, the white ruins of the mills, and at the bottom, the harbor, with the painted boats on its flat water and the sun going down behind the mole in a long blaze of red.

Nobody said anything. Stav had put down his fork.

When Pávlos brought the tablet back, Fotiní had taken off her glasses and was turning them over and over in her fingers.

She said something. Kóstas, who had been silent the whole time, answered her, in Greek that was halting and old-fashioned and full of Chicago, and she laughed through her nose, and said something else, and he laughed too, and dragged a thumb across his eyes.

"What did she say?" the son asked Stav, low.

"She said Dad's Greek is like a coat that's been in the closet since 1979. She said it still fits, it just smells funny." Stav swallowed. "And she said the fig tree is the same one. She said she climbed it. When she was, like, my age."

On the screen, Fotiní leaned toward the camera.

"Stávro," she said. "Tomorrow you go up to the Mána. To the fountain. You stand in front of the fence, and you look at the fish, the marble fish, between the spouts. And you tell me" — she said the next part in English, slowly, for the son — "if he still laughs."

---

Late that night, when Kóstas and Stav were asleep in the house and Pópi and her husband had gone home up the stair, the son sat on the terrace wall in the dark with the teacher.

The village was quiet above them. A dog barked somewhere and stopped. The sea below was black, with the lights of the harbor on it in long wavering lines, and the stars over the island were so many and so bright that the son kept looking up and then away, as if they were too loud.

"I have something to show you," Pávlos said. "Your Chicago family's woman, Maureen, said I should. She said you would understand it."

He opened the tablet. The screen lit his face from below.

It was a map. A map of the whole world, dark blue, and on it, everywhere, small points of light. Clustered thickest on the island itself, a tiny bright knot in the Aegean. But scattered, too, all over the world, in ones and twos and dozens. Chicago. Astoria. Baltimore. Montreal. Melbourne, a whole galaxy of them. Johannesburg. Cape Town. A single pin in Lagos. Two in Buenos Aires. One in Anchorage, Alaska, which Pávlos said was a man who had gone to fish crab in 1974 and never come back and never stopped sending money.

"Every one is someone from Askýra," he said. "Or the child of someone. Or the grandchild. Two thousand, one hundred and six. I put in every one myself. I find them on the telephone, in the old letters, in the post office books. Every week I find one more." He touched the knot of lights in the Aegean. "Here, three hundred and twelve. In winter, two hundred and ninety. My school, seven children." He moved his finger to Chicago. "Here, forty-one. Now — " He touched the screen, and one of the Chicago lights blinked, and moved, and slid across the Atlantic, and settled on the island, among the others. Then another. "Now thirty-nine. Because two of them are sleeping in the house behind you."

The son looked at the two moved lights in the bright knot.

"Do they know they're on it?"

"Of course. Everyone who is on it, they asked to be on it. Or their family asked. Nobody is on it who did not want." Pávlos closed the tablet, and the dark came back. "When the company came, in March, with their lawyer and their papers, the lawyer stood up in the school, where we had the meeting, and he said: 'This island is dying. Three hundred people. In twenty years, a hundred. Who will farm these terraces? Nobody. We are bringing life.'" The teacher was quiet for a moment. "And I wanted to show him this map. Two thousand, one hundred and six. To say: this island is not dying. It is only far away. But I did not show him. Because he would have seen it the other way. He would have seen two thousand people who are not here to sign anything."

The son said nothing.

Above them, a long way up, there was the faint, patient hum of the pump, carried down the dry valley on the night air. Neither of them mentioned it. But the son noticed that the teacher, when it came, turned his head toward it, the way a man turns toward a voice he has learned to hate.

The Fish behind the Fence

For anyone who asks.

*Someone once wanted to know why every race I enter seems to be beside water. A lake, a river, a bay, a sea. It is not a rule. It is more like a compass that points one way whatever I do with it. My mother asks of every place I go whether there is water, before she asks anything else, and I suppose I grew up thinking that was the first question. It still seems to me the right one. A place tells you what it is by how it treats its water. Whether it shares it. Whether it remembers where it comes from. Whether it lets a stranger drink.*

---

The old path to the spring went up from the back of Skála in a stair of flat stones laid edgeways, worn hollow in the middle by two hundred years of hooves and boots, and Eight climbed it at first light on Sunday with the valley still in shadow and the sea behind him going from black to steel.

The path had walls on both sides, waist-high, dry-stone, gray, with caper bushes growing out of the cracks in them, sprawling and gray-green and hung with fat pale buds and a few late flowers, white with long purple whiskers. Beyond the walls the terraces went up on either side, step after step, and on every step the same story: dead tomatoes, brown vines, beans gone to straw, the earth pale and cracked into plates like an old glaze. Here and there a fig tree still stood green, and an olive, and once a pomegranate with its fruit splitting on the branch, red seeds spilling out of the cracks like something wounded. Lizards went across the stones ahead of him in quick brown streaks. The air smelled of thyme, crushed under his boots where it grew between the steps, and of dust, and of the sea.

Halfway up he passed the first of the dovecotes, a square white tower with the dawn showing through its slate lace, and the pigeons on its ledges all turned their heads at once to look at him with one eye, and then the other.

The village was still asleep when he came up under it. He did not go into it. He followed the path where it bent left along the foot of the village wall, and the plane trees began, and then he was standing in front of the Mána.

The fountain was exactly as it was on the postcard, and nothing like it.

It was set into the hillside at the head of the valley, under a cliff of gray rock, a facade of white marble three meters wide and twice his height, gone gold and gray with age and streaked with green where water had run down it for well over a century. Four spouts stood out from it at waist height, in a row, each carved as the head of an animal: a lion, a ram, a lion, a ram. Under them ran a long marble trough, worn smooth along its lip by more than a hundred and thirty years of jars and hands and the muzzles of donkeys. Above the spouts, in low relief, the carving: a cypress tree in the middle, tall and narrow as a flame, and on either side of it a bird, perched, one with its head turned back over its shoulder, and below the birds, swimming along the top of the trough toward the left, a fish.

It was a fat fish, with a round eye and fins like little flags. Its mouth was open in what was, beyond any argument, a grin.

Over all of it stood the plane tree. It was enormous. Its trunk was so wide that four men could not have joined hands round it, gray and cream and olive, peeling in patches like a map of unknown countries, and its branches went out over the fountain and the little square in front of it and the path and the first of the terraces below, so that the whole space lived in a green, moving, underwater light.

And in front of all of it, the fence.

It was two meters high, galvanized steel mesh on steel posts set in concrete, running from the cliff on one side round in a curve to the cliff on the other side, enclosing the fountain and the trough and the little square of paving in front of them, and a steel gate in the middle of it, locked with a chain. On the gate, a sign. White, blue lettering, in Greek and in English. *PRIVATE PROPERTY. ASKYRA SPRINGS S.A. NO ENTRY.* And under that, smaller: *Security cameras in operation.*

There was a camera, on a pole, in the corner, a small white box with a black eye, pointed at the gate.

The spouts were dry. All four of them. The lion and the ram and the lion and the ram, mouths open, and nothing coming out of any of them, and the trough beneath them dry, with a skin of pale dust in its bottom and a few curled brown plane leaves, and a dead wasp.

To the left of the fountain, in a corner of the fence where the cliff met the hillside, there was the concrete block. It was newer than anything else for a kilometer. It was the size of a garden shed, square and gray and windowless, with a steel door and a grille in its side, and from the grille came the hum. Out of its far side, down the hill, ran a black plastic pipe as thick as a man's thigh, along the foot of the cliff, behind the fountain, out of sight.

Eight stood in the green light under the plane tree and looked at the fish.

---

He heard the old man before he saw him: the click of a stick on the stones, and a cough.

The man came down the path from the village with the stick in one hand and a plastic chair in the other. He was in his late seventies, small and bow-legged, in a flat cap and a gray shirt buttoned to the throat, with a face like a dried apricot and a white stubble on it that glittered in the green light. He did not look at Eight. He walked to a place by the plane tree's trunk, outside the fence, where the ground had been worn bare and flat, and set the chair down there, and sat in it, and put his stick across his knees, and looked at the fountain.

After a while, Eight said, in Greek, "*Kaliméra.*"

The old man turned his head. He looked at Eight for some time, from the boots up.

"*Kaliméra,*" he said. Then, in an English that came out slow and rusty, as if from a cupboard: "You are the man with the green car."

"I am."

"I hear it. Yesterday. From the boatyard. All the village hear it." He looked back at the fountain. "Lefterís says you are a good man. He says he knows from your car. He says a man who does not paint over the welds is a man who is not ashamed of how a thing is made." He shrugged. "Lefterís is a romantic. I am Spýros. Lambrou. I am the *nerofýlakas*. You understand? The guard of the water." He tapped his chest with one finger. "Forty-one years. My father before me, thirty years. His uncle before him, and the first warden before that. Every day, I come here. I open the stones, I close the stones, at the hours. Every Sunday, I write the hours in the book." He nodded at the fence. "Now, every day, I come here and I sit."

"Why?"

The old man looked at him as if he were simple.

"So it knows somebody is still here," he said.

Eight took a step closer to the fence and looked through the mesh at the dry spouts.

"The book," he said. "Where you wrote the hours. Where is it?"

Spýros was silent for a time. A pigeon came down out of the plane tree and landed on the lip of the dry trough inside the fence, and walked along it, and put its beak down into the dust where water should have been, and lifted it, and walked on.

"In February," the old man said, "the secretary from the municipal office comes. Vrettákos. Sotíris. I know him from a boy, his mother was from here. He says, Barba Spýro, the book of the water, it must go to the office, for the new map, the cadastre, they will scan it, so it is safe forever. In the computer." He made a small motion with his hand, a flicking away. "So it is safe. Forever. I give it to him. A hundred and thirty years, every Sunday, every hour, every family, in the hand of the first warden, and my father's uncle, and my father, and me. Blue cover, cloth, like a ledger. Big. Heavy." He held his hands apart, the width of a big book. "He gives me a paper. A receipt. I have it in the house."

"And the book?"

"In March I go to the office. To see it. He says it is in Syros, for the scanning. In April, the fence. In April, the pump. In May I go to the office again. He says, Barba Spýro, what book?" The old man's voice did not change at all. "What book."

Eight said nothing.

"Then the company has a paper," said Spýros. "From 1931. A sale. They say, in 1931, the *koinótita*, the community, the village council, it sells the spring. The Mána, and the land around, and the rights of the water. To a man. A man from Syros, a merchant. For money. And the man's family, they keep it all these years, and they never come, they never say, and this year they sell it to the company." He spat, neatly, to one side, into the dust. "In 1931 my father's uncle is the guard. If the council sells the water, he writes it. In the book. It is not in the book." He turned his head and looked at Eight. "I know. Because I read it. Every page. Many times. On winter nights, when there is nothing to do, I read the book of the water like other men read the newspaper."

"So the book would show the sale never happened."

"The book would show," said Spýros, "that in 1931, and '32, and '33, and every year, until February, the water of the Mána went to the families of this village, at their hours, and not to any man from Syros. And no man from Syros ever came to ask for his hour." He looked back at the fountain. "That is why there is no book."

---

The boys came up the path an hour later, with the sun.

Stav came first, at a run, the violin case bumping on his back, which he had apparently brought out of a conviction that if he ever put it down someone on this island would play it without him. The son came after him, slower, with the recorder in his hand. They stopped at the fence. Stav put his hands on the mesh and leaned his forehead against it and looked at the fountain, at the dry spouts, at the plane tree, without a word.

"It's smaller," he said finally. "In the picture it looked huge."

"Everything looks huge in a picture someone's kept for sixty years," said the son.

Stav took out his phone. He held it up to the fence, and the screen lit, and the son heard, faintly, the ringing, and then the click, and then a voice from the other side of the world, from a kitchen above a bakery where it was still the middle of the night: *Stávro?*

"Yiayiá. I'm here. I'm at the Mána. I'm looking at it." He turned the phone so the camera saw through the mesh. "Can you see?"

There was a silence on the phone.

"The fish," said Fotiní's voice, small and tinny. "Show me the fish."

Stav pushed the phone up against the mesh, as close as it would go, and held it there, his arm stretched up, his face turned to watch the screen and the fountain at once. Spýros, in his chair under the plane tree, had turned round to watch the boy. Eight had stepped back into the shadow of the trunk.

The marble fish grinned out through the wire, as it had grinned at every child in this village since 1891.

"*Yelá akómi,*" said the small voice on the phone. And then, in English, for the boys, though she must have known only one of them needed it: "He still laughs."

Stav lowered the phone. He was crying, the son saw, and trying not to, and failing, and did not seem to care. Spýros got up out of his plastic chair, slowly, with the stick, and came over to the fence, and stood beside the boy, and put one hand on his shoulder without a word, and the two of them stood there, sixteen and seventy-seven, and looked at the fish together.

The son did not switch on the recorder. He had asked himself, on the way up the path, whether he would, and decided he would only do it if someone asked. Nobody asked. He wrote it down instead, afterward, on a wall in the sun, in pencil, in the notebook: *The fish still laughs. Spýros, 77. Stav. The phone. No recording.* And then, because he could not help it, the weather.

---

At noon there was a party at the harbor.

It had been going since eleven, on the concrete of the mole, under a long white tent with blue banners on its corners. The banners said *ASKYRA SPRINGS HISTORIC RALLY*, in Greek and English, with a logo of a drop of water with a mountain inside it. There were tables with white cloths and trays of small cheese pies and stuffed vine leaves and glasses of white wine, and a sound system playing something with a bouzouki in it that the son was fairly sure Fotiní would have described as a crime. There was a photographer. There was a man from a television station in Athens with a camera on his shoulder. And at the end of the mole, on a low platform of blue carpet, lit by the noon sun like a jewel in a window, there was the car.

It was a wedge. It was very short and very wide and very low, with a nose like the blade of a shovel and a windscreen that wrapped round the cockpit like the visor of a helmet, and the whole of it was painted white with stripes of red and green and a band of blue, and at the back, over the engine, which sat behind the driver, there was a little spoiler like the tail of a swallow. It looked like nothing else on the island. It looked like a thing that had landed.

"Lancia Stratos," Iríni said, beside Eight, at the edge of the crowd. She was eating a cheese pie with an expression of deep suspicion. "1975. Real. Not a copy. Six cylinders, in the middle, Italian. He bought it at an auction in Monaco for more money than this island has seen in fifty years. He drives it himself. Badly." She finished the pie. "He drives it like a man who has been told he is good at it by people he pays."

The man in question was standing by the car.

He was in his early fifties, tall, tanned to the color of a saddle, with silver hair swept back and teeth so even they looked bought in a set, in a linen shirt the blue of the banners and soft brown shoes without socks. He was laughing with a woman from the television, his eyes always a few inches wide of the lens, like a man who never needs to look for it.

"Fílippos Dráganis," said Iríni. "Galáni Blue Partners. A fund. Money from somewhere, money from somewhere else. Hotels, marinas, a golf course on Crete that nobody plays on. The water is his idea. The bottles. Spring water from a legendary island spring, a hundred and thirty years, the old marble, very romantic, he will sell it in London in blue glass for six euros." She dusted the crumbs off her fingers. "The man beside him with the moustache and the face like a wet dog is Vrettákos. The secretary. Look at his shoes."

Eight looked. Beside Dráganis, half a step back, stood a man of about fifty-five in a suit that was too warm for the day and too good for his shoulders, with a gray moustache and a damp, anxious, heavy face and a sheaf of papers held against his chest like a shield. His shoes were new. Italian. Brown and shining.

"Three hundred euros," said Iríni. "Maybe four. A municipal secretary on an island of three hundred people." She shrugged. "Maybe he has a rich aunt."

At the front of the tent, somebody tapped a microphone.

Dráganis stepped up onto the blue carpet beside the Stratos and took it. He spoke in Greek and then in an English that had come back from an English school sounding expensive. He thanked the island, and the municipality, and Mr. Vrettákos, who ducked his head. He said that thirty years ago this island had held a rally, and that it had been the pride of the Cyclades, and that he was proud — humbled — to bring it back. He said that rallies, like islands, were about the past and the future meeting on a road. He said Askýra had been forgotten by Greece, but it would not be forgotten again. He said that the company was bringing life to Askýra. Jobs. Visitors. Water, bottled at the source, that would carry the island's name around the world.

While he spoke, girls in blue T-shirts went through the crowd with trays of small blue glass bottles, and handed them out, one to each person.

The son, standing behind the crowd with Stav, took one without thinking. It was cold. Beaded with condensation. On its label, in white, was the drop of water with the mountain inside it, and under that, *ASKYRA SPRINGS. From the ancient spring of Kryovrysi.* And, smaller, a drawing: a marble fountain with four spouts, and above them, very small, two birds, a tree, and a fish.

Stav looked at the bottle in the son's hand. Then he looked up at the man on the blue carpet, speaking into the microphone, laughing at his own joke.

"That's her water," Stav said. "He's selling us her water."

All around them, along the mole, in the noon sun, the people of Askýra were standing holding small blue bottles of their own spring, and not one of them, the son saw, had opened theirs.

At the edge of the crowd, under the tamarisk by the kafeneío, a retired man in a plain shirt and a cap, who had come for the rally, held his bottle up to the light for a moment, and looked through the blue glass at the man on the carpet, and set it down unopened on the nearest table, and smiled at nobody, and walked away along the harbor toward the boatyard where his green car waited among the boats.

Kyría Elpída's Cloth

Kept private.

*Pópi Lambrou told me this morning, over the counter of her shop, while she weighed out coffee, that my son stood at the fence yesterday with a recorder in his hand and did not switch it on. A boy cried in front of him and an old man put his hand on the boy's shoulder, and my son wrote it down in pencil afterward instead. She told me as if it were gossip. She did not know whose father she was telling. I paid for the coffee and walked out along the mole and stood at the end of it for some time. At his age I would have recorded everything. I would have called it evidence.*

---

Kyría Elpída Vasilákou lived at the very top of Kryovrýsi, in the last house before the village gave up and the hill began, and to reach her you climbed a stair so steep and so narrow that the son, going up it behind Pópi on Monday afternoon, could put out both hands and touch the whitewashed walls on either side.

"She is ninety-one," Pópi said over her shoulder, climbing, a covered dish in her hands. "She does not like to be told she is ninety-one. She likes to be told she is the oldest woman on Askýra, which is different. And she does not like recorders. Ask first. Ask twice. And eat whatever she gives you, even if you are full, especially if you are full."

"I know," said the son.

"How do you know?"

"Every old lady I've recorded since June has had the same three rules."

Pópi laughed, and the laugh went up the stair ahead of them and round the corner and in at a green door that stood open at the top, and from inside the door a voice, thin and dry and perfectly clear, called out something in Greek that made Pópi laugh harder.

"She says she heard us from the bottom," Pópi said. "She says I laugh like a goat. She says bring the American and the Chicago boy and come in before the cheese gets warm."

The house was one room, long and low, with a floor of flagstones polished to a dull shine by a century of feet and a ceiling of dark beams, and it was full. It was the fullest room the son had ever been in. On every wall, from the floor to the beams, there was cloth. Embroidered runners and pillow covers and long narrow towels, pinned up one over another like the feathers of a bird, brick red mostly, and a blue so dark it was almost black, and here and there a green or a gold. The patterns were birds, and trees, and ships, and stars, and women holding hands in a line, and small men on small horses, and flowers on long stems that turned into other flowers, and borders of zigzags and triangles and tiny repeating diamonds so fine they made the son's eyes ache to follow them. The light came in from a single window at the end of the room, low, and lay across the cloth in a long slant, so that every thread stood up out of its ground with a small shadow beside it.

In the middle of all of it, at a table by the window, sat a woman so small that at first the son did not see her.

She was in black, a plain black dress and a black cardigan, with a white scarf tied over her hair and knotted under her chin, and her face inside the scarf was brown and folded in on itself like a walnut, and her eyes were very bright. In front of her on the table, in a wooden hoop, there was a square of white linen with a needle in it, and a red thread hanging from the needle, and beside the hoop a pair of glasses so thick they looked like two small round windows of a ship.

She looked at the son. Then she looked past him at Stav, who had come in last with the violin case on his back, ducking under the lintel.

"*Tou Pétrou,*" she said.

Pópi translated: "She says: Pétros's. Your great-grandfather's. She says you have his ears."

Stav put a hand to his ear, startled. The old woman laughed, a high small cackle like a pullet's, and said something more.

"She says Pétros Margarítis had the biggest ears in the Cyclades, and the girls teased him, and he said it was so he could hear the water coming before anyone else, and that is why your family's hour began when the shadow left the fish, because your great-great-grandfather heard the water first and claimed the best hour." Pópi set the covered dish on the table. "She says this is not true. She says it is just what he said."

---

They ate first. They had to.

There was cheese, a soft white one still weeping whey and a hard yellow one sharp enough to make the son's jaw ache. There were figs, split and dried in the sun on a rack on the roof and then pressed flat, chewy and sweet and dusted with something that turned out to be ground fennel seed. There was a dish of something the color of dark amber, trembling slightly, set in a shallow bowl and scattered with sesame and crushed walnuts and cinnamon, which Kyría Elpída pushed toward the son with one finger and watched him eat.

It tasted of grapes. Not of grape juice, or of wine, but of the grape itself, deepened, darkened, cooked down until it had become something else: thick and soft and set like a pudding, sweet without being sugary, with the faintest edge of sourness and of smoke.

"*Moustalevriá,*" Pópi said. "From the must. When we press the grapes, at the harvest, we take the juice, before it becomes wine, and we boil it with a little flour until it sets. Every September. This is the first of this year." Her face changed. "There are not many grapes this year. The vines on the lower terraces are dead. These are from the high ones. Kyría Elpída's nephew carried water to them all summer in a can."

The old woman said something.

"She says the first moustalevriá of the year is for the stranger who comes to the house," Pópi said. "She says that is the custom. She says that is you."

The son looked at the bowl, and then at the old woman, who was watching him with her bright eyes, and put another spoonful in his mouth, and she nodded, satisfied.

---

He asked about the cloth after they had eaten, through Pópi, carefully. Whether she had made all of it. Whether she would talk about it. Whether — he lifted the recorder off the table and held it up so she could see it — she would let him record her voice while she did.

She looked at the recorder. She said something short.

"She says what is it," said Pópi.

"Tell her it keeps her voice, so her great-great-grandchildren can hear how she talked."

Pópi told her. The old woman listened. Then she looked at the recorder again for some time, and then at the son, and said something longer.

"She says she does not have great-great-grandchildren. She has a nephew in Piraeus and two great-nephews in Melbourne who do not speak Greek." Pópi paused. "She says perhaps the little recorder can be her great-great-grandchild. She says yes."

So he recorded, and that night, in the house under the third terrace, he cut her words out of the recording one by one and laid them into the list the teacher kept for the island, where anyone of Askýra could press a word and hear an old woman say it: *mýlos*, *perastikós*, the names of the stitches. But first, at the table, he set the recorder on the table among the figs and the cheese, and the old woman talked, and Pópi translated, sentence by sentence, and Stav sat on a low stool by the door with the violin case across his knees and listened, and the light from the window moved slowly along the wall of cloth.

She had made all of it. She had begun at six, sitting on her own grandmother's lap, with a needle the size of a fish bone. Every girl on the island had done it, in those years, from six until she married, and some of them after, and the cloths were for the house a girl would have one day, for her bed and her table and her walls, and every pattern had a name and every name had a story. The birds facing each other across a tree were called *the two who talk*. The line of women holding hands was the *syrtós*, the dance, and you could tell from the number of women whose family had made it, because each family put a different number in the line. The ships were for the men at sea, and the stars were for finding them. The small men on horses — she laughed — were for nothing at all, they were just men on horses, every island embroidered them, nobody knew why, perhaps because there were no horses on any of the islands and the girls wished there were.

"And this one," she said, through Pópi, and pointed past the son's shoulder at the wall behind him, "this one is the water."

The son turned round.

It was a long cloth, a runner, narrower than the others and very long, perhaps two meters, pinned along the wall at the height of his eyes so that it ran from one corner almost to the window. It was linen, gone the color of cream with age, and worked in thread of seven colors, and at first he could not see what it was. It looked like a border pattern stretched out to the length of a whole cloth: bands of color, one after another, each one a different width, separated by small motifs.

Then he saw the fountain.

It was at the left-hand end, in white thread on the cream linen, so faint it was almost invisible: the four spouts, the trough, the plane tree over it in green, and the birds, and, if he leaned close, the tiny fish, three stitches of silver gray, with an eye. From the fountain, running to the right, along the whole length of the runner, went a line of blue — the water — and above the line of blue, one after another, were the bands of color. A band of red. A band of gold. A band of green. A band of rose, very narrow. A band of dark blue, divided in two by a single line of white down its middle. And at the end of each band, above it, in tiny red cross-stitch, a word.

He leaned in close. Pópi came and stood beside him and put on her glasses.

"*Vasilákis,*" she read, softly, under the red band. "*Gavalás. Margarítis.*" Under the dark blue band with its white line down the middle: "*Rousákis — Lambrou.*" She drew a breath. "*O mýlos.* The mill." She moved along. "*Mavrommátis.*" And then, at the end of the line of colored bands, before a whole new run of colors began for the afternoon, there was a band that was no color at all. It was the bare linen, the cream ground, unworked, with nothing on it. A gap. And above the gap, in red, the smallest letters of all.

Pópi read them and did not translate. She did not have to. The son had read them on the back of a postcard and in his own handwriting on a train.

"*Tou perastikoú,*" said Stav, from the door. He had come up behind them. "Of the passer-by."

Kyría Elpída, at the table, said something.

"She says she made it in 1948," Pópi said. "When she was thirteen. The schoolteacher, the old teacher before the war, she told the girls each to make something of the island that would be true, for the school-leaving, and every girl made the fountain, or the harbor, or a boat. And Elpída made the water. The Sunday hours. Every family's hour, as wide as the hour was long, in the colors of their door." Pópi's voice had gone strange. "She says the teacher gave her the prize, and then took it back, because the teacher said the hours were not art, they were arithmetic. And Elpída's father went to the school and shouted, and the teacher gave it back again."

The old woman laughed her pullet's laugh, and said something more, and wiped her eyes.

"She says the passer-by's hour, she left empty on purpose. Because it does not belong to any family, so it does not have a color. She says the teacher thought she had forgotten to finish it, and her father shouted about that too."

The son stood looking at the runner, at the bands of color, at the gap of bare linen.

"Pópi," he said. "The postcard. Mrs. Margaríti's. The hours she wrote on the back." He found, in his notebook, the page where he had copied it, on the train, Stav's translation, line by line. He held it beside the cloth. "Can you read it to me again. In order."

Pópi read the card's list from his notebook, aloud, in Greek, and he followed along the cloth with his finger. Vasilákis, from first light to the top of the plane tree: red. Gavalás, and the widow through his channel: gold, and at the end of the gold, very small, a second, narrower band of gold, lighter, which he had taken for a mistake. *The widow,* Pópi said, *Kouri, through his channel,* and touched the narrow band. Margarítis, until the time the bell would ring, two hours less a little: green, and the green band was a fraction shorter than the gold. Rousákis and Lambrou, half and half, they always argued: dark blue, split down the middle by a white line, and the son saw now that the white line was not quite in the middle, that one half was perhaps two stitches wider than the other, and he wondered which family had won that argument in 1948.

The mill. Mavrommátis. And then the gap.

It matched. Every family, in the same order. Every hour, in the same proportion. A woman of eighty-four in Chicago had written it from memory in blue ink on the back of a postcard, sixty-three years after she left, and a girl of thirteen had stitched it in seven colors of thread in 1948, and the two of them had never compared notes, and they agreed, to the width of a band, to the narrow strip of gold for a widow who had come across the sea before either of them was born.

He lowered the notebook.

Kyría Elpída was watching him from the table, with the needle in her fingers again, the red thread hanging from it.

She said something.

"She says," said Pópi slowly, "she knows what you are doing. She says the boy with the green car's father is doing something with the rally, and the boy with the notebook is doing something with the old women, and everybody in the village has noticed, and nobody will say anything to anybody from the company, because nobody on Askýra has ever told anybody from Syros anything in their lives." Pópi took off her glasses. "She says when you need the cloth, you come and ask her, and she will give it. She says it is hers and she will give it to whoever she likes, and she would like to give it to the passer-by."

---

They went down the stair in the evening light without speaking.

Halfway down, Stav stopped.

"There's something else," he said.

The son turned.

"The cassettes," said Stav. "Pappoús's. The ones I've been learning from all summer. He recorded them at the island society dances, in Chicago. In the seventies. In a hall on Halsted. There were musicians from here who came over and played, sometimes, when they visited family." He shifted the case on his back. "There's one from 1977. It says on the label in his writing, *Michális, violí. The water tune.* I didn't know what that meant. I thought it was, like, a song about the sea." He looked down the stair, toward the roofs of the village going down step by step to the harbor. "Kyría Elpída said the old teacher. Before the war. Is there someone here called Michális? Who plays the violin?"

Pópi had stopped too, below them on the stair. She turned round and looked up at the boy.

"Michális Rousákis," she said. "Eighty-three. He lives behind the kafeneío. He has not played in four years. His hands." She held up her own hand and curled the fingers, stiff. "He says he has lost half of the water tune anyway. The turn in the middle. He says it went out of his head when his wife died and never came back, and without the turn it is not the tune, it is just a man scraping."

Stav looked at her.

"I have the turn," he said. "I think. I think I've been playing it all summer. Out of the window. Over the bakery."

Pópi gave no answer. She set the empty dish down on the step, there, in the middle of the stair, and took out her phone, and stood in the narrow evening street with whitewash on both sides of her and the swallows going over, and pressed a name, and when it answered, said, in Greek, very fast, something with *Michális* in it and *Chicago* in it and *the turn* in it, and then listened, and then held the phone out to Stav.

From the phone came a man's voice, old and cracked and suddenly very loud, saying a single word over and over.

"He says come," said Pópi. "Now. He says bring the violin. He says do not stop to eat."

Reconnaissance

For anyone who asks.

*On tarmac the road stays where it is. On gravel the road is a loose thing lying on top of a road, and it moves. Every car that goes through a corner sweeps the stones outward, so by the tenth car there is a clean line through the bend, packed hard, and on either side of it a bank of loose marbles waiting for anyone who strays. The first car on a gravel stage drives on the marbles. The last car drives in ruts. Somewhere in the middle there is a road. Most of rallying is guessing where.*

---

The organizers gave the crews two days to drive the stages before they were closed, at legal speed, in ordinary cars, with the roads still open to goats and trucks and old women on donkeys, and Iríni spent both of them in the passenger seat of the square truck with a stack of spiral notebooks on her lap and a pencil clamped in her teeth.

"Again," she said, at the bottom of the first stage, on Tuesday, at seven in the morning, when they had driven it once. "Slower."

"We drove it at thirty."

"Then twenty." She took the pencil out of her teeth. "The first time is for the eyes. The second time is for the hands. The third time is for me." She turned to a clean page. "I do not care what this road looks like. I care what it is going to do to you at a hundred and ten with the sun in your face. Again."

The first stage began at the harbor, at the foot of the boatyard, and went straight up the valley. The organizers called it *Mána*, and it was nine kilometers and four hundred meters of tarmac, old and patched, laid in the seventies over the line of the mule path and widened since, just, so that two small trucks could pass if both of them breathed in. It left the harbor between the last houses, ran three hundred meters flat beside the dry stream under the plane trees, and then went up the side of the valley in switchbacks, one above the other, cut into the hillside between the terrace walls, so that from the bottom the road looked like a piece of gray ribbon someone had folded back and forth on itself and pinned to the slope.

Iríni read it into the notebook the way some people read music. Eight drove and listened and said nothing.

"Start. Fifty. Right three, over bridge, narrow. Eighty. Left two, keep in. Wall outside. Thirty, into: hairpin right, around stone. Caution: oil from tractor, always, every morning, the man's tractor leaks." She wrote. "Hairpin left. Long. Opens. Into right four, over crest. Do not cut — ditch."

Eight drove. The terrace walls went by at the height of the truck's windows, gray stone fitted without mortar, each stone set by a hand that had known how it would sit against the next for two hundred years. Lizards lay flat on them in the early sun. The inside of every hairpin was a sharp stone corner of terrace with no room for error at all.

On the fifth hairpin a boy of about ten sat on the terrace wall above the road with a dog beside him and watched them come round, and waved, and the dog barked. Iríni wrote something.

"What was that?" said Eight.

"*Kids, dog, wall, right side.*" She did not look up. "There will be spectators. Everybody on this island will be on these walls on Saturday. Children. Old men. They will sit with their feet hanging over the road, and the marshals will tell them to move, and they will move, and then they will move back." "When we come round that corner at eighty and there is a dog in the road, I want you to have already been told."

Above the eleventh hairpin the road came out under the wall of the village and ran along it, past the stair down to the house under the third terrace, past the shop, past the kafeneío at the top of the village with its two tables in the street, and then, in a sudden dark green tunnel, under the plane trees in front of the Mána.

Eight lifted off without meaning to.

They went by the fence at fifteen kilometers an hour. The galvanized mesh. The locked gate with its sign. The marble, gold and gray in the green light. The four dry mouths. The fish. Spýros was in his plastic chair under the plane tree, and lifted one hand from his stick as they went past, and Eight lifted one hand from the wheel.

Iríni wrote, without being asked: "*Plane trees, dark, light changes. Fountain left. Fence left.*" She paused, pencil above the page. Then she added something else, small, which he did not see.

Beyond the fountain the road climbed onto the bare shoulder of the island and ran along the ridge in long fast curves to a cairn of whitewashed stones on the summit, where the stage ended. From there they could see Tinos to the southwest, long and high, Mykonos low and pale to the south, and far to the east, faint, a dark hump of mountain like the back of a whale, which Iríni said was Ikaria.

"Again," she said. "Slower."

---

The second stage was gravel, and it was the reason the son had seen his father come back to the boatyard on Monday evening, after driving it once alone in the truck, and sit on an upturned crate among the hauled-out boats without speaking for a quarter of an hour.

They called it *Kávos*, the cape. Fourteen kilometers and two hundred meters, along the whole north coast of the island, from a dirt crossroads under the summit to the lighthouse on the farthest point.

It was not a road. It was a track bulldozed along the top of the cliffs, sometimes ten meters from the edge, sometimes two, sometimes, on the blind outside of a bend, nothing at all between the gravel and the drop. The surface was white, crushed marble and schist, in places packed hard as concrete and in places deep and soft as sugar. The north side took the full force of the meltémi all summer, and nothing grew taller than a man's knee: thyme and sage and spiny burnet in low tight cushions, every one of them leaning to the south. The rock was gray and white and rust-red, banded like a cut cake, and the cliffs went down sheer from the edge of the track, fifty meters, eighty, a hundred, to a navy sea ridged with white, the wind tearing spray off the waves in long low streamers like smoke.

"This is the stage that wins or loses the rally," said Iríni, at the start line. "On the tarmac, everybody is close. Here, somebody will make a minute. Or lose one."

They drove it three times on Tuesday and three times on Wednesday. Iríni wrote it in a language that grew denser with each pass: numbers for the corners, one for the tightest and six for the fastest, and between them the distances in meters, and the words. *Crest. Don't cut. Keep out. Over jump. Loose. Ruts. Opens. Tightens. Long. Caution.* And the warnings that made Eight's palms go damp on the wheel even at thirty kilometers an hour: *Edge.* *No wall.* *Big drop outside.* She wrote those in red. There were nineteen of them in fourteen kilometers.

On the third pass on Wednesday, a car came up behind them.

It came fast, far faster than the law allowed on an open road, a gray rented sedan with its headlights on in daylight, and sat a meter off the truck's bumper through three bends, swerving out to look past, swerving back.

"Do not move over," said Iríni, without looking round. "There is no room, and he knows it."

At the next straight the gray car pulled out and went past, very close, its tires throwing gravel against the side of the truck with a sound like hail on a tin roof, and as it passed Eight saw the driver: silver hair swept back, sunglasses, a blue linen shirt, one hand on the wheel, the other holding a phone to his ear. He was laughing at something the phone had said. He did not look at the truck. In the passenger seat sat a heavy man with a shaved head and a black T-shirt, who did look, briefly, at Eight, with no expression whatever.

The gray car went on along the cliff in its plume of dust, too fast into a bend that Iríni's notebook called *Left 2 tightens, big drop outside, red*, and the back end of it stepped out on the loose marble toward the edge, and the driver caught it with a flick, still holding his phone, and was gone.

Iríni watched the dust settle.

"Dráganis," she said. "And his Kósmas. Who drives his boat and opens his doors and stands behind him at parties." She looked at the notebook on her knee, at the red word *Edge* she had written two lines ago. "He did not even look at the road," she said. "He thinks it is his. He thinks the cliff will move for him."

---

They stopped for lunch at the lighthouse, at the end of the stage.

The lighthouse stood on the last bare knuckle of the island, a short whitewashed tower with a roofless keeper's house beside it, and beyond it the land simply ended. On the point, a hundred meters from the tower, dozens of survey stakes with orange tape on top flapped in long straight lines across the thyme. And a sign, on two steel posts, in the same blue and white as the sign at the Mána. *ASKYRA SPRINGS RESORT. 120 suites. Infinity pools. Spa. Opening 2028.*

They ate in the lee of the keeper's house: bread, sardines, a hard cheese, and small green grapes from the one vine at the top of Kryovrýsi that someone's nephew had kept alive by carrying cans.

"Infinity pools," Iríni said, looking at the sign through a grape. "On the driest side of an island that has one spring. Six pools. A hundred and twenty suites, every one with a shower like a waterfall. And the bottling, two shifts." She ate the grape. "The Mána gives, in summer, in a dry year, maybe four or five liters a second. I looked at the old reports. The Ministry of Agriculture measured it in 1964 and in 1991. There is enough for a village and its terraces and a mill stream, if they share by the hour, as they always have. There is not enough for a village and a hotel and a factory. So." She spread her hands. "No village."

Eight said nothing. He was looking at the survey stakes. That evening the son would see them on the teacher's map of the island, added in orange, a little square of dots on the point.

"You want to know how they did it," Iríni said.

"I know how they did it. A paper from 1931 that says the community sold the spring to a merchant from Syros. I want to know who wrote it."

Iríni took a folded sheet of paper out of the inside pocket of her red jacket and gave it to him.

"Thirty years I sat in an office in Athens, with a window that looked at a wall, and read who owns Greece," she said. "I still have friends in that office." "This is the chain. Who declared what, when. It is public, if you know where to look. Most people do not know where to look."

He unfolded it. It was a list of entries, in Greek, typed, with dates and parcel numbers and names, and beside some of them, in Iríni's small upright hand, notes in English.

*2023, March: parcel declared (spring + surrounds + "water rights") by Ioánnis Kalogerópoulos, Ermoupoli, as heir of merchant Antónios K. (d. 1952). Basis: notarial deed of sale, 1931, community of Kryovrýsi to Antónios K. Copy certified 2023 by notary in Ermoupoli from "family papers". Original: not filed. No objection lodged by any islander (none knew). First registration: Kalogerópoulos.*

*2025, January: sold, Kalogerópoulos to Askyra Springs S.A. (Galáni Blue Partners), 4,200,000 euros.*

*Kalogerópoulos: 71, retired, lives in a two-room flat in Ermoupoli above a phone shop. Has never been to Askýra. His sister's daughter is married to Sotíris Vrettákos.*

*Payment of 4,200,000: received by Kalogerópoulos's bank 14 Jan; transferred onward 15 Jan, 4,050,000, to a company in Limassol, Cyprus, name below. Directors of that company: not public. (Friend at the bank says: ask what a 71-year-old man in a flat above a phone shop wants with a company in Limassol.)*

Eight read it twice.

"The man above the phone shop," he said. "Has he been asked?"

"Not by me." Iríni picked another grape off the bunch. "I am a retired woman from Athens who likes old cars."

"And the deed. The 1931 deed. The original."

"Nobody has seen it. The notary certified a copy from 'family papers' which he says he returned to the family, and the family is a man above a phone shop. A copy of a copy. Against nothing. Because the other side has nothing. The islanders have no deed. They never had a deed. They had a book, with every hour of every Sunday since 1895, in the hands of four wardens, and the book would show that no merchant from Syros ever drew one cup of water from that spring in ninety-four years. A judge would look at that book and at a copy of a copy and laugh." She looked at him. "And the book is gone."

"Taken in February. By Vrettákos. For scanning."

"You know already."

"I met the warden." Eight folded the paper and gave it back to her. "Keep it. It's yours. You found it."

She took it back, and looked at him sideways with her pale silver eyes.

"You do not want anything with your name on it either," she said.

"No."

"Good." She brushed the crumbs off her knees and stood up, small and straight in her red jacket against the dark sea. "Then we understand each other. Now. Again. *Kávos.* Slower. I want the nineteen red words to be in your hands, not in my notebook."

---

On the way back down the island they passed a car parked above the terraces with its bonnet up: a low, square, wide-arched sedan, white with stripes of blue and dark blue and red along its flanks. A young woman in overalls stood over the engine with a laptop on the fender, very tall, with black hair cut short and a smear of grease on one cheekbone, and she looked up as the truck slowed, and saw the 8 on its door, and grinned.

"You are the Escort," she called, in English. "The one in the boatyard. With the boats."

"I am."

"Dimítra Kanáki. Thessaloníki. The BMW." She slapped the fender of the white car with the flat of her hand, affectionately, like the flank of a horse. "Eighty-seven. Group A. It belonged to my father. He drove the Acropolis in it twice and never finished. I am going to finish." She looked at the truck, at Iríni in the passenger seat, at the notebooks on her knee, and her grin went wider. "*Kyría* Iríni. They said you had retired."

"I have," said Iríni. "I am retired in the passenger seat."

Dimítra laughed. She looked back at Eight.

"I will see you on the *Kávos*, then," she said. "From behind, I hope. Your car is very beautiful. My car is faster." She bent back over the engine. "And when you see the Stratos on the cliffs, give him room. He drives like he owns the sea."

"He seems to think he does," said Eight.

Dimítra straightened and looked at him again, quickly, and then down the valley at the dead terraces and the small gray square of concrete at the top.

"Yes," she said. "I know. My grandmother was from Tinos. We talk, the islands." She shut the bonnet. "Good luck, Escort."

The Turn

Kept private.

*There is a kind of man who drives a cliff road without looking at it. I have raced against a few. They are often fast, for a while, because fear slows the rest of us and they do not feel it. They believe the road was made for them, so it will keep them. It is an old mistake and it does not only happen on roads. The cliff does not know who they are. I have learned to give such men room, and to wait. I do not wish them harm. I only notice that the edge is patient, and they are not.*

---

Michális Rousákis lived behind the kafeneío in a room that had been a stable, and the son, going in at the low door on Monday evening behind Stav and Pópi, smelled the stable still, faintly, under the tobacco and the coffee: hay, and leather, and something warm and animal that a hundred years of whitewash had not covered.

The old man was standing in the middle of the floor waiting for them. He had not sat down. He was tall, taller than anyone the son had yet met on the island, and gaunt, in a white vest and black trousers held up with braces, with a full head of white hair standing straight up from his scalp as if he had been running his hands through it all afternoon, which, Pópi said afterward, he had. His hands hung at his sides. The son looked at them and then tried not to: the knuckles swollen into knots, the fingers bent sideways at the joints like twigs that had grown round a stone.

On the table behind him, out of its case, lay a violin. It was very old. Its varnish had gone almost black, and worn through to pale wood on the shoulder where a chin had rested for sixty years, and there was a crack along its belly mended with a long neat seam of glue.

"*Pou eínai?*" the old man said. Where is it?

Stav took the phone out of his pocket. His hands were shaking. He found the file. He held it out.

From the phone, small and full of hiss, came the sound of a hall: voices, chairs scraping on a wooden floor, a child laughing, a man shouting something in Greek and being cheered. Then a laouto, a long-necked lute, tuning, three notes, four. Then a violin. Playing something fast and bright and running, a tune that went round and round on itself like water in a channel, lifting and falling, and under it the laouto keeping time, plucked hard, *chop, chop, chop*, and under that the floor of the hall beginning to thud as people got up to dance.

Michális Rousákis closed his eyes.

The son watched the old man's face as he listened. It did not move. Nothing in it moved. But his hands, at his sides, the ruined hands, had begun very slightly to twitch: the left one, the fingers lifting and falling, one after another, in a pattern; the right one, the wrist turning, back and forth, an inch.

The tune ran round, and round again. And then it changed.

It went up. It went up and over something, like water going over a stone, a phrase that climbed and hung and twisted back on itself, in a different key or a different mode, the son did not know the word, something sadder and higher and stranger, a phrase that seemed to be asking a question, once, and then a second time, more urgently — and then it fell, and resolved, and was back in the bright running tune again, as if nothing had happened.

On the recording, the hall cheered.

In the stable behind the kafeneío, the old man made a sound. It was not a word. It was the sound a man makes when he has put down something very heavy that he has been carrying a long way.

"*To gýrisma,*" Pópi said, very softly. "The turn."

---

It took them until midnight.

Michális could not play it, and then he could. That was how the son wrote it down later, because there was no other way to write it down. The old man picked up the black violin and set it under his chin and took the bow in his ruined right hand, and the first notes came out of it like something tearing, scraped and broken, and he stopped, and stood with the violin under his chin and his eyes shut, breathing hard through his nose. Then he started again. And the second time it was better. And the fifth time, the bright running tune came out of the black violin into the stable, rough-edged, slower than on the recording, with every note given its own weight, as if each one cost something, and he played it round and round, and then, where the turn should come, he stopped.

He lowered the bow. He looked at Stav.

Stav had his own violin out of its case by then. He had been holding it in his lap, not daring. He stood up. He put it under his chin. He looked at the old man, and the old man nodded, once, and Stav played the turn.

He played it the way he had learned it, out of a window above a bakery on South Halsted, over and over, all summer, from a cassette his grandfather had recorded in a hall on Halsted Street in 1977: careful, a little stiff, exactly as it was on the tape, every note in place. It climbed and hung and twisted and asked its question twice and fell.

Michális Rousákis listened to it with his head tilted.

Then he said something, sharply, and Pópi translated, and the son saw her trying not to smile.

"He says you play it like a schoolboy. He says you play it like it is written down. He says the turn is not written down, it is a man looking up the valley to see if the water is coming, and it has not come yet, and he is worried, and then he sees it. He says play it like that."

Stav went red. He played it again.

"He says better. He says you are looking up the valley but you are looking at your phone."

Again.

"He says now you see the water."

And then the old man lifted his black violin, and played the bright running tune, the first part, slowly, and when he reached the end of it Stav came in with the turn without being asked, and the old man let him, and they went round it together, the old violin and the new one, the boy's notes clean and bright and the old man's rough and dark, and when the turn fell back into the tune the old man took it, and played it on, and the boy followed him, and the son, sitting on an upturned crate by the door with the recorder running in his lap because the old man had told him, in the first ten minutes, *Switch it on, switch it on, what are you waiting for, for me to die?*, watched Pópi Lambrou on the bed's end, a hand pressed over her mouth.

They stopped at midnight because a man came to the door, a heavy man of about fifty-five with a laouto case on his back and a face like Michális's poured into a shorter mold, and said in Greek that his uncle was keeping the whole village awake and that he had come to complain, and then sat down and opened the case and took out the laouto and tuned it, three notes, four, and played with them until one.

His name was Andréas. He was the old man's nephew. He fished for a living and played at weddings and name days and the panigýri, and he had played every tune his uncle knew except one, because his uncle had stopped playing that one before Andréas was old enough to learn the turn, and had said it was not to be played at all if it could not be played whole.

"*Tou Neroú,*" Andréas told the son, at one in the morning, packing the laouto. "*Of the Water.* It is a syrtós, a round dance. You play it once a year. In September, when the channels are cleaned, after the summer. The whole village goes up to the Mána. The warden lifts the first stone, and the water comes down into the big channel along the village, and the violin plays, and everybody dances along beside the water, down the channel, to the first terrace. To the Vasilákis terrace. Where the first hour begins." He shut the case. "My uncle played it at the Mána every September for fifty years. The last time was four years ago. Then my aunt died, and the turn went out of his head. Then there were no Septembers. Then the fence." He stood up and shouldered the case. "And now a boy from Chicago brings it back in a telephone."

He looked across the stable at his uncle, who sat on the bed now with the black violin across his knees, and Stav, who was sitting beside him, very close, holding his own violin by the neck, and the two of them were not talking, because they had no language in common except the one they had just been using.

"In Chicago," Andréas said, "who played the bouzouki? On the tape? I hear a bouzouki at the end."

"My grandfather," said Stav, without looking up. "Stamátis Margarítis. He played rebetiko on Halsted. On Saturday nights. In the clubs. For thirty years." He touched the strings of his violin, lightly. "Yiayiá says he had two musics. The island music, for when he was happy. The rebetiko, for the *xenitiá*. For being far away." He looked at the old man beside him. "She says he played the rebetiko a lot more."

Michális Rousákis, who did not speak English, seemed to understand that. He put one of his ruined hands on the back of the boy's neck and left it there.

---

On Wednesday night, after the second day of the recce, the son went down to the boatyard.

It was after ten. The kafeneío had put its chairs up on the tables, and a single light burned on the end of the mole. The boatyard shed was dark except for one bare bulb hanging from a beam at the back, and under the bulb, among the hauled-out boats, the green-gray car sat on its wheels with its bonnet up, and his father sat on an upturned crate beside it with a cup of coffee, and beside his father, on another crate, sat Barba Lefterís Gavalás with a small glass of something clear, and at the far end of the shed, on a scaffold of planks beside the bow of a boat, sat a young woman with a paintbrush.

This was Chrysánthi Gavalá, Lefterís's granddaughter, twenty-five, who had gone to art school in Athens to study the conservation of paintings and had come home in the spring, for a month, to see her grandfather, and had not gone back. She was small and quick and wore her black hair in a knot with a pencil through it, like her grandfather's pencil, and her forearms were spattered to the elbow with a dozen colors of paint.

She was painting a name on the bow of the boat.

The boat was a *trechantíri*, the son had learned: double-ended, pointed at both bow and stern, broad and deep in the middle, with a high, curving sheer that swept up at each end like the horns of a lyre. It had been built, Lefterís had told him on Saturday, by Lefterís's father, in this shed, in the winter of 1962 to 1963. Its hull was painted white below the waterline mark and a deep warm ochre above it, the color of the terrace walls in the evening, and along its upper edge, from bow to stern, ran a band of blue, a clear strong sky blue, with a thin stripe of red beneath it. On the bow, in the bulb's yellow light, Chrysa was finishing the name in capitals, in white, with a fine brush, freehand, her tongue between her teeth.

*ΦΩΤΕΙΝΗ.*

"*Fotiní,*" the son said.

"Yes." Chrysa did not look round. "Yiórgos Mavrommátis's boat. His father's before him. Built the winter your Mrs. Margaríti left. Yiórgos's father named it." She lifted the brush and looked at the last letter. "My grandfather says Yiórgos's father was in love with her. My grandfather says the whole island was in love with her. My grandfather says this about every woman who left the island before 1970."

On his crate, Lefterís said something in Greek, short and dry.

"He says it was true of that one," said Chrysa. She put the brush in a jar. "He says she had a laugh you could hear from the boat." She climbed down off the scaffold, wiping her hands on a rag, and came and stood beside the son and looked at the name with him. "Every three years we repaint. Every three years, the same colors. The same blue. The ochre. The red stripe. The colors are the family's. The Mavrommátis boat has always been ochre and blue, since before it was this boat, since the boat before it. You can look across the harbor and know who is coming in by the colors before you can see the faces. I photograph every one, every time, for the island's archive, so nobody has to remember the blue." She pointed with the rag at the other boats in the shed, hauled out on their timbers: one green and white, one red and gray, one a yellow like the yolk of an egg with a band of black. "My grandfather says the colors are the oldest words on the island. Older than the names."

"There were more," said Lefterís, in English, from his crate.

They turned. His eyes were on the open front of the shed, at the dark harbor beyond it, with the glass in his hand.

"When I am young," he said, "in this harbor, sixty boats. Wooden. Caiques, *trechantíria*, *perámata*. All painted. All different. Then, from the nineties, Europe says, too many fishing boats in the sea. Too many fish taken. So they pay." He drank. "They pay the fishermen, to stop. To break the boat. You understand? Not to sell it. To break it. A man brings his boat here, his father's boat, his grandfather's boat, and a digger comes, and it breaks the boat in pieces, there, on the slipway, while a man from the government watches and writes in a form. And then the government pays." He set the glass down on the concrete. "I watch forty boats broken on my slipway. Forty. Some I build. Some my father build. Some I paint every three years, since I am twelve." He looked at the bare ribs of the new boat on the slipway outside, pale in the light from the mole. "Now I build one. Slowly. For nobody. For my granddaughter to paint."

Nobody said anything for a while. Outside, a small wave slapped against the slipway, and drew back.

---

When Lefterís had gone up the hill to his bed, and Chrysa had climbed back onto her scaffold to finish the red stripe on the stern, the son sat down on the old man's crate beside his father, and told him about the cloth.

He told it plainly, in order: the house at the top of the village, the walls of embroidery, the runner of seven colors pinned at the height of his eyes, the bands, the names, the gap. The postcard held up beside it. How they matched. His father listened without interrupting, drinking his coffee, looking at the car.

When the son had finished, his father put down the cup.

"Thirteen," he said.

"In 1948."

"And it matches a card written in Chicago this summer by a woman who left in 1963."

"To the stitch. Even the widow's channel."

His father nodded slowly. Then he took out of his pocket a folded sheet, a photograph of a list on his phone, and showed the son Iríni's chain. The son read it in the bulb's light. Kalogerópoulos. 1931. A certified copy from family papers. Four million two hundred thousand. Four million fifty thousand, the next day, to Limassol. The sister's daughter married to Vrettákos.

"So the book is the only thing that proves it," the son said. "The cloth and the card prove what people remember. But the book proves what happened. Every Sunday. In 1931."

"Yes."

"And Vrettákos has it."

"Vrettákos took it. Whether he still has it is another question." His father put the phone away. "If I were Vrettákos, I'd have burned it. But Vrettákos is a man who keeps receipts, and buys shoes he can't afford, and stands half a step behind someone at a party. Men like that don't burn things. They keep them, in case they need to prove later that they were only following instructions." He looked at the car. "If I were Dráganis, I'd want it where I could see it. Not in Vrettákos's house, where his wife might find it, or his conscience. I'd want it in my own safe."

The son was quiet a moment.

"The man above the phone shop," he said. "Kalogerópoulos. Seventy-one. Never been here. Somebody should go and ask him what he did with the original."

His father turned his head and looked at him.

"I'll go," the son said. "Monday. I've got a reason to be in Ermoupoli. The archives of the Cyclades are there, the state ones, the old notary books. I'm a student. I'm researching emigration from the islands. It's even true." He hesitated. "Iríni could come. She knows the building. She knows who works there."

His father said nothing for long enough that the son began to think he had said something wrong.

"You'd be careful," his father said finally. It was not quite a question.

"I'm always careful. You taught me careful before you taught me to ride a bike."

"That was your grandfather."

"Then he taught me." The son's eyes went to the 8 on the green door under the bulb. "You said I could say no. To any of it. Ever. On the plane." He swallowed. "I think that has to mean I can say yes, too. To some of it. If I choose. Otherwise it's not really a choice, it's just a door you're holding shut very politely."

At the end of the shed, Chrysa had stopped painting. She was sitting on her scaffold with the brush in her hand, not looking at them, very carefully not looking at them.

His father picked up the coffee cup. It was empty. He looked into it.

"Monday," he said. "With Iríni. You ask him one question, about the original, and you watch his face, and you leave. You don't push. You don't threaten. You don't tell him anything." He set the cup down. "And you take the ferry back the same night. Not the morning. The same night."

"Okay."

"And you tell me everything you see."

"I always do."

"No," said his father. "You always tell me everything you think I should know." He got to his feet, knees complaining, and he put a hand on the roof of the car for a moment, as if steadying himself, though he did not need to. "This time, tell me everything."

On the scaffold, very quietly, Chrysa began to paint again: a thin red stripe, freehand, perfectly straight, running the length of a boat called *Fotiní* toward its stern.

The Olive Press

For anyone who asks.

*I am sometimes offered money for my cars, usually at parties, usually by men who have just watched one of them win something. I have never sold one. It is not sentiment. It is that a car built for a particular road is a kind of letter to that road, and a letter is not much use to anybody but the person it was written to. A man who wants to buy it is really asking to buy the road. I tell them that politely. Most of them laugh. One or two have understood, and those are the ones I would have sold it to, if I sold cars.*

---

The invitation came on Thursday, on thick cream card, delivered by hand to the boatyard by a girl in a blue T-shirt who would not meet anyone's eye.

*Galáni Blue Partners and Askyra Springs S.A. have the pleasure of inviting the people of Askýra, and the entrants of the Askyra Springs Historic Rally, to an evening of island hospitality at the Old Olive Press, Saturday, at eight. Presentation of the community partnership programme. Dinner. Music.*

The same card had been delivered to every house on the island. Pópi had one on the counter of her shop by Thursday noon, standing up against the scales, and was charging a euro to anyone who wanted to look at it, for the school.

"Community partnership programme," she said, to the son, when he came in for bread. "In March it was a 'proposal for regeneration.' In April it was a fence. Now it is a partnership. Next it will be a wedding."

"Are people going?"

"Of course people are going." Pópi wrapped the bread in paper. "Free dinner. Free wine. And everybody wants to see inside. Nobody has been inside the press since the company bought it. They put new doors. Steel. And a guard at night." She handed him the bread. "And everybody wants to see the faces of the other people who go. Who sits where. Who talks to who. Who eats the lamb." She looked at him over her glasses. "On an island, a dinner is never a dinner."

---

The old olive press stood on the coast road two kilometers east of Skála, on a flat shelf of land between the cliffs and the sea, and Eight walked there on Saturday evening along the shore, alone, in a clean white shirt and a jacket, a retired man going to a party.

He had looked at the building from the water, on the landing craft, and from the cliff road above it twice that week in the truck, and once, on Thursday night at two in the morning, from much closer than that. It was long and low and built of stone, with a pitched roof of old red tile and a tall square chimney at one end, the stack from the boiler of the steam press that had replaced the donkeys in 1904 and been replaced itself by nothing at all in 1978, when the last of the island's olive oil had been pressed and the building had been left to the swallows. The swallows had gone now. The company had re-roofed it, half of it, and replaced the great wooden doors on the seaward side with doors of brushed steel, and put a new building beside it, a white box of a warehouse with a loading bay and a forklift parked in front, where the bottles were filled. The black pipe from the Mána came down the hillside behind it and went into the white box through a hole in its wall.

Along the shore, as he came closer, there was music, and lights strung on poles, and the smell of meat cooking over charcoal.

They had set it up on the terrace between the press and the sea: long tables with white cloths, a bar under the blue banner, two lambs turning on a spit, and on a little stage three young men from Athens with a bouzouki, a guitar and a keyboard, playing songs from the radio. Most of the island was there already, in its good clothes, standing about in clusters with glasses of the free wine, looking at the steel doors and the lambs.

They did not sit down. Nobody had sat down. The chairs at the long tables were all empty, and the island stood around them in the warm evening, in its clusters, like guests at a wedding where the bride has not yet arrived and everybody has heard a rumor.

Eight saw the son at the far end of the terrace, with Kóstas and Stav, and Pópi, and Pópi's husband the other Kóstas, standing by the sea wall. He did not go over. The son saw him, and did not come over either, and went on talking to Pópi. That had been agreed.

He saw Spýros Lambrou, the warden, standing alone by the corner of the old press, with his stick, in a jacket too big for him, not holding a glass. He saw Michális Rousákis, very tall, with his white hair combed down flat for once, standing beside his nephew Andréas with his hands in his pockets, and he saw the old man turn his head toward the band, where the young man with the bouzouki was playing something with a great many notes, and turn it away again, with an expression of deep pain. He saw Lefterís Gavalás, and beside him Chrysa, in a dress, with paint still under her fingernails. He saw the schoolteacher, Pávlos, with the tablet under his arm, looking at everything.

He did not see Kyría Elpída. He had not expected to.

---

Dráganis came out of the steel doors at a quarter past eight, into the light, with Vrettákos half a step behind him and the man called Kósmas a step behind that.

He did it well. Eight noted that. He came out smiling, with his arms a little open, in a white linen jacket over the blue shirt, and he went straight to the nearest cluster of islanders, a group of old men by the bar, and shook every hand, and said every name, which he had learned. He asked one about his grandson in the army and another about his knee. He laughed. He touched a shoulder. He went on to the next cluster, and the next, and Vrettákos went behind him, shaking hands too, nodding, sweating in his suit, and Kósmas went behind them both, saying nothing, his shaved head turning slowly from side to side like a lighthouse lamp.

By the time Dráganis reached the middle of the terrace, people had begun, here and there, to sit down.

He went up onto the little stage. The band stopped. He took the microphone.

He spoke for twenty minutes, in Greek and then in English. He told them about the partnership programme. Every family that had owned a terrace on the slopes of the valley would be offered a payment. Not for the land, which the company did not need. For the *trouble*. For the *transition*. He said the word *transition* several times, in both languages. It would be a generous payment. He named a figure per *strémma*, which the son, later, told his father was about a quarter of what a building plot in the harbor sold for, and a twentieth of what the same land would fetch once there was a hotel on the point. In exchange the family would sign a simple document, releasing any historic claim to the water, which, as everybody knew, had been sold by the community in 1931, and had been in private hands ever since, and which the company had acquired lawfully, as the new national register showed. He was sorry, deeply sorry, that this had been a shock to people. He understood. His own grandmother had come from an island. He knew what water meant on an island. That was why he was here, tonight, with an open hand.

The terraces were dying, he said, not because of the company but because of time; the young had gone, and the old could not carry water in cans forever. The company would plant them, with drip lines, managed by professionals. There would be jobs. The young would come back.

"Askýra," he said, in English, at the end, holding the microphone close, his voice going quiet and warm, "has been forgotten. Not by you. By Greece. By the world. We are going to make the world remember it. Every time someone in London or New York or Tokyo lifts a blue bottle and drinks, they will be drinking Askýra. Your water. Your spring. Your name."

There was applause. Not much. Some. It came mostly from the entrants of the rally, the drivers and the mechanics in their team shirts at the two tables nearest the stage, who were not from the island and had been drinking the free wine since seven. The islanders sat in their good clothes and looked at the stage, and a few of them clapped, politely, three or four times, and stopped.

Then Kóstas Margarítis stood up.

The son, beside him, felt it before he saw it, the way you feel a truck go past. Kóstas stood up from his chair at the sea wall end of the long table, a big heavy man in a short-sleeved shirt, with the bakery still white on his arms, and he did not ask for the microphone. He had never needed one on Halsted.

He spoke in Greek. The son did not understand all of it. He understood that it was the Greek of a coat that had been in a closet since 1979, old-fashioned and broken and full of Chicago, and that every islander at the long tables turned round in their chairs to look at him, and that halfway through, Spýros Lambrou, by the corner of the press, took off his cap.

Stav translated, afterward, on the walk back along the shore in the dark, as well as he could.

"He said he's Fotiní's son. Pétros Margarítis's grandson. From the house under the third terrace. He said he was born in Chicago and he makes bread on Halsted Street, and his mother left this island in 1963 with one suitcase, and she has kept it in her head every day since, every step, every wall, every hour of the water. He said she wrote the hours on a postcard. From memory. He said the man from the company should know there are forty-one people in Chicago, and nineteen in Astoria, and thirty in Melbourne, and two thousand altogether, who are from this island and have never sold anything, and they're not dead and they're not forgotten, they're just far away, and they all have telephones." Stav kicked a stone into the dark water. "And then he said — I think he said — 'You say your grandmother is from an island. Which island? What was her hour?' And the guy didn't answer. He just smiled. And my dad sat down."

---

Dráganis found Eight at the bar, afterward, when the lambs had been carved and the band had started again and the island had, at last, sat down to eat, because wasting lamb was a crime even at an enemy's table, Pópi said, and in any case it was very good lamb.

"The Escort," Dráganis said, in English, holding out his hand. "The man with the Escort. In the boatyard. I have been wanting to meet you since Ermoupoli. Somebody sent me a photograph of it going onto the landing craft. I said to Kósmas: there is a man who understands what a car is."

Eight shook his hand. It was warm and dry and very firm, a hand that had been told firmness was a virtue.

"I'm a retired man with an old car," he said. "I heard there was a rally on an island. I like islands."

"Everyone likes islands." Dráganis took two glasses of wine from the bar and gave him one. "Where from? America?"

"California."

"Ah. Wine country."

"The coast."

"The coast." Dráganis drank. He looked at Eight over the glass with very pleasant brown eyes that were not doing anything pleasant at all; they were adding him up. "You drove the *Kávos* on Wednesday. With the old woman. Iríni Stathopoúlou." He smiled. "I know who she is. Everybody in Greek rallying knows who she is. She read pace notes on the Acropolis in eighty-four for a privateer from Vólos, and they were the first Greek crew home. She is very good. You are lucky she was free."

"My usual co-driver has flu."

"Of course." Dráganis turned his glass in his fingers. "I will be honest with you, because I like you, and because you are a guest on my island. I would like to buy your car."

"It isn't for sale."

"Everything on an island is for sale. That is what an island is." Dráganis smiled. "I have a Stratos. I have a 037, in Athens. I have a Quattro, in a garage in Munich. I do not have an Escort. A real one, a BDA, from Cumbria, with history." He said *Cumbria* very lightly, and watched Eight's face while he said it, and Eight let his face do nothing at all. "I made some calls. I know who built it. She is very good, and very private, and she does not sell to people like me. She told my man on the phone to go to hell." He laughed. "I liked her. I will pay you twice what it is worth. After the rally. You can drive it next weekend, you can win or lose, and on Monday it goes to Athens on my boat and you go home with a great deal of money and a story."

Eight drank some of his wine.

"It's built for this island," he said. "For these roads. It would be wasted in Athens."

"Then it stays here. In my museum. I am building one, in the hotel. Cars and boats. The history of the island." Dráganis spread a hand at the dark sea, at the lights of Skála across the bay. "Old caiques, restored. Old engines. Old photographs. The rally, from the eighties. Your Escort, with the 8 on the door, under a light, and a little card that says, *Driven by an American gentleman in the Askyra Springs Historic Rally.*" He leaned in slightly. "Everything here will be in a museum soon. That is what is happening to all the islands. The question is only whose museum."

Eight looked at him for a moment.

"I'll think about it," he said.

"Do." Dráganis clapped him on the shoulder and turned away into the crowd, his hand already out to someone else, his voice already warm. "Do think about it."

Kósmas did not follow him at once. He stood a moment longer at the end of the bar, a big man with his arms crossed and a glass of water in one hand, and looked at Eight, without hostility and without interest, the way a dog that has been well trained looks at a stranger in its master's house: noting him, and the doors, and the distance between them.

Then he went.

---

Eight finished his wine. He went to find the washroom, which was inside the old press, through the steel doors, at the end of a long stone hall.

The hall had been the pressing floor. The great stone basins were still there, set into the floor in a row, round and shallow and as wide as a table, with the huge granite millstones that had crushed the olives standing upright in them on their edges, like wheels left by a giant. The company had cleaned them and lit them from below with blue lights, so that they glowed. Along the walls hung framed photographs, enlarged, black and white: the press in 1910, men in caps beside the steam boiler; donkeys loaded with sacks of olives in a line along the shore; women in white headscarves picking on the terraces; the harbor full of caiques, sixty of them, mast beside mast. Under each photograph, a small brass plate. *The Heritage of Askýra. Galáni Blue Partners.*

Past the washroom door there was a staircase going up, wooden, new, to a gallery that ran along the back wall of the press under the roof, and on the gallery, a single door, closed, with a keypad lock beside it and a small red light glowing on the pad.

Eight did not go up. He did not look at the door for more than a second.

He went into the washroom and washed his hands and looked at himself in the mirror, a man of fifty-nine in a white shirt with sun-lines at the corners of his eyes, and dried his hands, and came out, and walked back down the long hall between the glowing millstones and the photographs of the people whose island this had been, and out through the steel doors into the noise and the smell of lamb and the warm dark, where, at the far end of the terrace, an old man with ruined hands had taken a violin out of a case at last, in front of the young men from Athens with their bouzouki and their keyboard, and was standing very straight, with his white hair coming loose from its comb, waiting, until the whole terrace went quiet.

He did not play the water tune. He played something else, a slow, plain, island melody that the son did not know and Andréas joined on the laouto after three bars, and the islanders at the long tables put down their forks and listened, and some of the older women began, very softly, to sing; and the young men from Athens, standing beside their instruments, did not know whether to be offended, and looked at each other, and then, being musicians, sat down on the edge of the stage and listened too.

Dráganis, at the end of the terrace with a glass in his hand, smiled, and applauded when it was over, generously, longer than anyone.

Sesame Rings on Halsted

Kept private.

*He said Cumbria. He said it lightly, and watched my face while he said it. He has made calls. That means someone in his employ spent money last week finding out who built an old car for a stranger, and that he is the kind of man who wants to know where things come from, so he can buy them or break them. The woman in Cumbria told his man to go to hell. I will send her nothing, because she would not want it, and because anything I sent would be one more thread for him to pull. I will only remember, for the rest of the week, that I am being added up.*

---

At four o'clock on Sunday morning, on South Halsted Street, in the dark, the ovens were already hot.

Maureen Margarítis came down the back stairs from the apartment in a sweatshirt and her husband's apron, her hair knotted under a scarf the way her mother-in-law wore hers, and switched on the lights in the bakery kitchen, and found her mother-in-law already there, sitting on a stool by the long steel table with a bowl of dough in front of her and her sleeves pushed up past her elbows, kneading.

"You said you'd sleep," Maureen said.

"I slept." Fotiní did not look up. "I slept from ten to two. At my age that is a night. The rest is lying in the dark listening to my bones."

Maureen did not argue. Twenty-nine years of marriage into this family had taught her which arguments were real and which were only weather. She washed her hands at the deep sink and dried them and took the second bowl from the shelf and began to measure flour.

The bakery kitchen at four in the morning was her favorite place in the world, though she had never told anyone, not even Kóstas. It was warm and bright and quiet in a way nothing else in the city was quiet: the hum of the ovens, the slap of dough, a truck going by on Halsted with its lights sliding across the frosted window. It smelled of yeast and warm sugar and sesame and the faint scorched sweetness of last night's syrup, and under all of it, always, aniseed, which had soaked into the plaster of the walls in fifty-five years until the walls themselves smelled of it.

They worked without talking for a while. Fotiní kneaded. Maureen measured, and mixed, and set the sesame seeds to toast in a dry pan on the back burner, shaking it, until they went gold and began to jump and smell like popcorn.

The sesame rings were Sunday. They had always been Sunday. The bakery made bread and butter biscuits and custard pie every day; but the sesame rings were only Sunday, and they were from the island, and nobody in the family could remember a Sunday on Halsted Street without them. You rolled the dough into ropes as thick as your finger, and joined each rope into a ring, and dipped the ring into a bowl of water with a little grape syrup in it, and then into the toasted sesame, so that it came up crusted all over like a thing found on a beach. And then the oven, hot, until they went the color of the walls of the island in the evening.

Maureen made them better than her mother-in-law. Everyone said so. Fotiní said so herself, with an expression of profound suffering, to anyone who would listen.

"He called," Fotiní said at last, kneading. "Last night. Your husband. At eleven. That is seven in the morning on the island. He had been awake all night."

"Is he okay?"

"He stood up at the company's dinner and shouted at the man." Fotiní said it with no expression at all. "In front of the whole island. In his bad Greek. With flour on his arms, probably." She turned the dough over and pushed it away from her with the roots of her palms. "Pópi called me after. She said everybody is talking about it. She said Spýros Lambrou took off his cap."

Maureen stopped mixing.

"He took off his cap," Fotiní said again. She stopped kneading too. She sat there on her stool with her floury hands resting on the dough and looked at the frosted window, at the dark street. "Do you know what that means? Spýros. Who is seventy-seven and has not taken off his cap for anyone since men walked on the moon. For my son." She was quiet. "For Stamáti's son. In Stamáti's bad Greek."

Maureen came round the table and put her arms round her mother-in-law from behind, flour and all, and held her, and Fotiní allowed it, which she did perhaps twice a year, and they stayed like that for a while in the warm white kitchen with the ovens humming and the sesame beginning to burn in the pan on the back burner, and neither of them moved to save it.

---

The son called at ten in the morning, Chicago time, which was six in the evening on the island.

He called from the terrace under the house, at the table, in the slanting gold light, with the fig tree behind him and the dry channel at his elbow. Stav was beside him. Behind Stav, at the end of the terrace, sitting on the wall with his laouto across his knees, was a big man of about fifty-five whom Fotiní had last seen in a photograph sent to Chicago, aged four and screaming at a name-day party, and whom she recognized at once.

"Andréa," she said, on the screen, in the shop, where Maureen had stood the tablet in its case on the counter beside the display of syrup pastries, so that the regulars, coming in for their Sunday rings, had to look over her shoulder at the island. "Michális's boy. You had the ears of a mule."

Andréas laughed so hard he nearly dropped the laouto.

They had planned it in the morning, the son and Stav, at the kitchen table in the house under the third terrace, over coffee and the last of Pópi's bread. They had asked Michális first. The old man had said no, flatly, and then, an hour later, sent Andréas down the stair to say yes, but only the first part, because his hands were bad today; the boy would have to play the turn alone. So Andréas had come down with the laouto, and Stav had his violin under his chin, and the son held the tablet up to face them, and Fotiní Margaríti, in a bakery on South Halsted Street at ten on a Sunday morning, with three customers in the shop and Maureen behind the counter and the sesame rings cooling on their racks, heard the water tune.

Andréas played the first part, on the laouto, alone, plucking it out note by note, the bright running melody that went round and round. Then Stav came in on the violin, on the second time round, doubling it. And then, where the turn came, the laouto dropped back to its chop, chop, chop, and the violin went up alone, over the stone, and hung there, and asked its question twice — looking up the valley, the old man had said, to see if the water was coming — and fell, and found the tune again, and the laouto came back in under it, and they went round once more and stopped.

In the bakery, on Halsted, it was quiet.

One of the customers, an old man from the senior lunch called Vasílis who came in every Sunday for six rings and an argument, had taken off his hat. He did not know why. He was from Kalamata, on the mainland, and had never heard the tune in his life.

Fotiní did not say anything. She sat very upright on the stool behind the counter, her hands folded, her eyes on the screen.

Then she said, in Greek, quietly, "Stamáti. Do you hear that? The boy has the turn."

Maureen, behind her, put a hand on her shoulder.

On the screen, on the terrace on the island, Stav lowered the violin. He looked at the tablet, at his grandmother's face, small and far away and lit by the fluorescent lights of the shop. His face was very red.

"Was it okay?" he said. "Yiayiá. Was it okay?"

"No," said Fotiní, in English. "It was not okay. You played it like a schoolboy." She leaned toward the screen. "Again."

---

Afterward, when Andréas had gone back up the stair and Stav had gone to find Chrysa at the boatyard, the son stayed on the terrace with the tablet, and Fotiní stayed on the stool in the bakery, and they talked, the way they had talked on thirty-one recordings since June, with nobody translating, because by now she had decided that her English was good enough for him and his Greek was too bad for her, and it was quicker.

He told her about the cloth.

She knew about the cloth. She laughed at him for thinking she didn't. Elpída Vasilákou had taught her to embroider, she said, in 1950, when Fotiní was eight and Elpída was fifteen and already the best needle on the island. Elpída had made her unpick the same row of tiny diamonds eleven times, because they were not square. Fotiní had cried. Elpída had made her do it a twelfth time. "And she was right," Fotiní said. "They were not square. Tell her I said so. Tell her on Thursday, on her name day. Tell her the diamonds are square now. Tell her *chrónia pollá*, many years, from Chicago."

"Thursday?"

"The seventeenth. Elpída. Hope. It is her day." Fotiní looked at him over her glasses. "On the island, on your name day, you do not invite. Everybody comes. You open the door and they come. You give them a sweet and a little glass and they say *chrónia pollá* and they sit and eat your food and say it is not as good as your mother's, and they go, and more come. All day. Until night." She sniffed. "In Chicago nobody knows my name day. Only the bakery. The old men come in and say *chrónia pollá*, and I give them a free ring. Every year it is more free rings and fewer old men."

He asked her, then, about the passer-by's hour.

He had been waiting to. He had read it on the back of the card, and in the bare linen on Kyría Elpída's wall, and he had heard his grandfather's voice, in the barn at home, through his father's telling, saying that every place with too little water keeps an hour like that, if it is a decent place. He did not tell her that part. He only asked what it was for. Who used it.

She was quiet for a while.

"Anybody," she said. "That was the point. Anybody who came. A shepherd from another island, who had come over in a small boat with his goats and nowhere to water them. A family with a sick child, staying in a room at the harbor, who needed to wash. Sailors who had lost their boat. One year, a man who painted pictures, from Germany, who stayed six months and drew all the dovecotes and never paid his rent." She smiled. "But mostly it was for the ones who came in twenty-two."

"In 1922?"

"After Smyrna. When Asia Minor burned, and all the Greeks there, a million, more, came across the sea in anything that would float." She folded her hands. "Some came here. Not many. Eleven families, my father said. They came with nothing. Not a spoon. And they had no land and no water and no hour. So the village gave them the passer-by's hour. All of it. For years. They grew beans and tomatoes on borrowed steps with the passer-by's water until they had their own. And some of them married into the families and got hours of their own, and some of them went to Athens, and one of them — " She stopped.

"The widow Kouri," said the son. "Through Gavalás's channel."

Fotiní looked at him from the screen without speaking, from the stool behind the counter, across eight thousand kilometers and an ocean.

"You listen," she said finally. "That is what you do. You listen like a dog."

"Thank you."

"It was not a compliment." But she was smiling. "Yes. Kouri. A widow from Smyrna with two little girls. Lefterís Gavalás's grandfather gave her a piece of his own hour, through his own channel, because her husband had died on the boat, and she had nobody. Every Sunday for forty years. My father said she would stand at the end of the Gavalás terrace with her two girls and wait for the water, and when it came she would cry. Every Sunday. Forty years." Fotiní looked down at her hands. "And the old Gavalás stood there with her, every Sunday, and lifted the stone into her channel himself. He never let anyone else do it."

The son kept quiet. At his elbow the dry channel ran from end to end along the foot of the wall, a hand's width wide and a hand's width deep, with a single curled fig leaf lying in it where he had nudged it on the first night.

"Your father," said Fotiní. "The man with the car."

"Yes?"

"He has an hour like that. In him." She said it flatly, like a fact about the weather. "I saw it in the box. When you showed me the photograph of him, in June. In the barn, with the old car. I said to Maureen: that is a man who keeps an hour for the passer-by." She sniffed. "Maureen said I was being an old woman. I am an old woman. Old women know."

---

Before she hung up, she asked him to do one more thing.

She had seen it on the family's network, she said, where Maureen kept everything. A way to leave a message for someone that they could not open until later. Until a day you chose. Or until something happened. Maureen had shown her. You spoke into it, or you wrote, and then you sealed it, and it waited.

"I want to leave one," she said. "For Stávros. Now. While I am thinking of it."

"For when?"

"For when the water comes down the channel again." She named it the way other people name a Tuesday. "For the day he plays the turn at the Mána, with Michális, with the water coming. Not before. If the water never comes, he never opens it, and I will have said it to nobody, and that is fine." She looked at him over her glasses. "You can do that? Set it for a thing, not a day?"

"I can set it so that someone has to say it's happened. You choose who."

"Pópi," said Fotiní at once. "Pópi will know. Pópi knows everything that happens on that island before it happens." She settled herself on the stool, and straightened her cardigan, and put her glasses on properly, and looked into the camera. "Now go away. Turn me off. Maureen will do the sealing. This is not for you."

He did as he was told. The screen went dark.

He sat on the terrace in the last of the evening light, with the dry channel at his elbow and the fig tree going black against the sky, and wrote in his notebook, in pencil: *Eleven families. 1922. The passer-by's hour, for years. Kouri. Old Gavalás lifted the stone himself, every Sunday, forty years.* And then, under it, after a while: *She says Dad keeps an hour.*

He looked at that last line a long time.

Then, because he had promised his father, on a crate in a boatyard, that this time he would tell him everything, he did not cross it out.

Above the Phone Shop

For anyone who asks.

*The best road I ever drove was not in a race. It was a mountain pass in a country I will not name, at dawn, in a borrowed car with bad brakes, with nobody behind me and nobody ahead, and I was not trying to be fast. I was only trying to get to the bottom before a bridge closed. I have driven it in my head a thousand times since. I think the reason it stays with me is that it was the only time I drove a great road for someone else, and was not thinking about myself at all. People find this answer disappointing. They wanted a racetrack.*

---

The morning boat to Syros left Skála at six, a small blue ferry with a passenger deck and a hold for two trucks, and the son and Iríni were the only passengers on the upper deck, sitting on a bench in the wind with coffee in paper cups and the island going away behind them gray-gold in the first light.

Iríni had a newspaper she was not reading. The son had his notebook on his knee and was not writing. From out here, the whole island looked like a great stone staircase built for somebody who had never come down it.

"You are nervous," Iríni said, after a while.

"A bit."

"Good. A man who is not nervous before he asks a hard question asks it badly." She folded the newspaper. "Your father told you: one question. Watch his face. Leave."

"He told you too?"

"He told me nothing. He does not need to. I have sat in a car with him for two days." She looked at the sea. "He drives exactly as he would ask a question. One. Clean. Then out of the way." She drank her coffee. "You will do it differently. That is fine. You are not him."

The son looked at her.

"How am I going to do it?"

"Like a boy who records old people," said Iríni. "You will ask one question, and then you will wait, and you will not fill the silence. You will let him fill it. Old men always fill the silence. That is how you got thirty-one of them into your box." She stood up and threw the paper cup into the bin by the rail. "It is not a trick. It is just patience with good manners. Most people do not have either."

---

Ermoupoli in the morning was all marble and noise.

They came in past the shipyard, where a big rust-red cargo ship sat high and dry in a floating dock with men on scaffolds along its hull hammering at it in showers of sparks, and past the long quay where the big ferries tied up, and the town went up in front of them, stacked and shining, pale ochre and rose and cream, with green shutters and white balconies and the two hilltop churches catching the sun. They walked up through streets paved with marble worn so slippery that the son, in his sneakers, kept skating, past shops of loukoúmi, the soft square sweet in powdered sugar, flavored with rose and mastic and bergamot, and men on corners selling bread rings off long poles.

"This was the greatest port in Greece," Iríni said, walking fast, not looking at any of it. "In the 1800s. Before Piraeus. Ships from everywhere. Bankers, merchants, shipowners, from Chios, from Smyrna, from everywhere. That is why it looks like this." She waved at the façades, at the carved marble door frames, at the iron balconies. "They built the town hall to look like a palace and the theater to look like the one in Milan. Then the railways came, and the steamships, and Piraeus, and everybody left. Now it is the capital of the Cyclades and nobody knows it." She turned a corner into the main square, a vast open space of polished marble with palm trees and a bandstand and, at the top of it, a long pale building with a clock and a flight of steps as wide as a road. "And the merchants' grandchildren live above phone shops."

The archives were in the town hall itself, through a side door and up a flight of worn stairs, behind a door that stuck. Inside it was cool and dim and smelled of paper and floor polish, and a young man with a beard and a cardigan, in spite of the heat, sat behind a desk reading a novel. He looked up when Iríni came in, and his face changed: surprise, and then something warmer, and then, very quickly, nothing at all.

"*Kyría* Iríni," he said.

"Thanási." She put her bag on his desk. "This is a student from America. He is researching emigration from the small islands. For a university. He would like to see the notarial registers of Syros for 1931." She said it in English, for the son's benefit, and then again in Greek, for the young man's, and the young man looked at the son, and at Iríni, and at the clock on the wall, which said ten past nine.

"1931," he said. "All of them?"

"One notary. Ioánnis Pétrou Mamoúnas." She spelled it. "Act number 4,416."

The young man wrote it on a slip of paper. He did not ask why. He got up and went through a door behind the desk and up a stair, and they heard his footsteps going away overhead, and stopping, and a long silence, and then coming back.

He came down with a book. It was huge, bound in brown leather gone pale and powdery at the corners, as long as the son's forearm and as thick as his hand, with a label on the spine in faded ink. He laid it down in front of them, very gently, as if it might wake.

"Mamoúnas," he said. "1931. Acts 4,201 to 4,598." He opened it. "Gloves," he said to the son, and took a pair of white cotton gloves from a drawer and held them out, and the son put them on.

The pages were thick and creamy and covered from edge to edge in brown ink, in the beautiful, sloping, looping hand of a notary's clerk of 1931, line after line, entry after entry, each one numbered in the margin and signed at the bottom by men who had been dead for half a century. Thanásis turned them slowly, a few at a time. *4,380. 4,391. 4,402.* The son watched the numbers go by, and the dates, and the names, and every now and then a word he could almost read.

*4,416.*

Thanásis stopped. He turned the book round so that the son and Iríni could see it.

The entry was a page and a half long. It was dated the 14th of May, 1931. The son could not read it. He could read the names at the bottom, because Iríni read them aloud for him, quietly, in Greek and then in English, with one finger hovering a centimeter above the page.

"*Dowry contract.* Between Geórgios Vafeiádis, ropemaker, of Ermoupoli, and Nikólaos Sálas, carpenter, of Ano Sýros. On the marriage of Vafeiádis's daughter Anna to Sálas's son Dimítrios. The dowry: one house, two rooms, in the street of the ropemakers, with its cistern. Six sheets of linen. Twelve towels. One copper pan. One sewing treadle, foot-driven, German." She lowered her hand. "Witnesses. Signatures. Stamp of the notary."

The son looked at the page. At the copper pan and the six sheets of linen and the foot-driven German sewing treadle, ninety-five years old, written in a dead clerk's beautiful hand.

"There's no spring," he said.

"There is no spring," said Iríni. "There is no Askýra. There is no community of Kryovrýsi. There is no merchant called Kalogerópoulos." She looked at Thanásis, who was looking at the book with an expression of polite, intense, professional disgust. "The certified copy filed with the land register in 2023, which the company bought for four million two hundred thousand euros, says that the spring of the Mána was sold by the community of Kryovrýsi to Antónios Kalogerópoulos on the 14th of May 1931, before the notary Ioánnis Mamoúnas, by act number 4,416."

"And act 4,416 is a sewing treadle," said the son.

"And act 4,416 is a sewing treadle."

Thanásis said something in Greek, low, to Iríni. She answered. He nodded, and fetched a form, a stamp and an ink pad from a cabinet in the corner.

"He says," said Iríni, "that a researcher may ask for a certified copy of a page of the notarial archive, for a small fee, and that he will make it now, before anyone else comes in." She paused. "He says he would not like to be asked later why he did it. He says if anyone asks, a student from America asked for page 4,416 for his research on emigration, and that is all he knows."

"Tell him thank you."

"I will not," said Iríni. "He would hate it."

Thanásis photographed the page. He printed it on an old printer in the corner that whined and hummed and took its time. He wrote on the form, and signed it, and stamped it, twice, with a heavy brass stamp that he breathed on first, and put it in an envelope, and gave the envelope to the son, and went back behind his desk and picked up his novel and did not look at either of them again.

The son put the envelope inside his shirt, against his skin, because it was the safest place he could think of.

Outside, in the bright square, with the pigeons going up off the marble in a clatter, he got his phone out and made a picture of the extract, in the shade of a palm tree, once, carefully, and sent it, not to his father, but into the island's shared archive, into a folder the teacher had made on Saturday night and called simply *Neró*, Water, which only seven people could open.

---

Ioánnis Kalogerópoulos lived in a street of shuttered houses behind the market, above a shop that sold phone cases and chargers and repaired screens, with a hand-painted sign and a window full of colored plastic.

The street door was beside the shop. The bell said *Kalogerópoulos* on a strip of yellowed paper under cracked plastic. Iríni rang it and then stepped back, against the wall opposite, in the shade, and looked at her phone, and became a retired woman from Athens waiting for a friend. That had been agreed on the boat. This was the son's.

The door buzzed. He went up.

At the top of a dark stair that smelled of cooking and old carpet, a door stood open, and in it stood an old man in a cardigan and slippers, small and stooped, with a long gray face and thin white hair combed carefully across his scalp, and a pair of glasses pushed up on his forehead. He looked at the son with surprise and then with something else, a flinch, quickly covered.

"Yes?" he said in Greek.

"Mr. Kalogerópoulos?" The son said it in English. "I'm sorry to bother you. I'm a student. From America. I'm researching families from the islands. Could I ask you one question?"

The old man looked at him. Behind him, through the door, the son could see a small room with a table covered in an oilcloth and a television playing a game show with the sound off and a birdcage with a yellow canary in it, hopping from perch to perch.

"I don't speak good English," the old man said, in good English.

"It's only one question."

The old man did not move out of the doorway. He did not shut the door, either.

"Ask," he said.

The son took a breath.

"The deed from 1931," he said. "The one about the spring on Askýra. The original. I'd really like to see it, for my research. Do you still have it?"

The old man's face did not change at first. Then it did. Not much. A slackening, around the mouth and under the eyes, as if something that had been holding it up for three years had been quietly let go. He looked at the son, and past him, down the dark stair, and back.

The son waited.

He did not explain or apologize. He waited, the way he had waited in thirty-one kitchens since June, and let the silence sit between them on the landing, with the canary hopping and the game show flashing in the room behind.

The old man filled it.

"There is no original," he said.

He said it in Greek first, and then, as if remembering who he was speaking to, in English. He said it quite calmly. He put one hand on the door frame.

"Sotíris brought me papers," he said. "My niece's husband. Three years ago. He said, Uncle, it is a formality, an old family thing, a piece of land on an island, nobody wants it, nobody will ever know, you sign here and here, and a man in Limassol will make it all tidy, and you will have something for your trouble. He paid my daughter's debts. She was in trouble, my daughter, with a bank. He paid them. Twenty thousand." He looked at his hand on the door frame. "I never saw any deed. There is no deed. There is a paper Sotíris typed on his computer in his office and a notary who is his friend from school put a stamp on it. That is all." He swallowed. "I never went to that island. I never saw that spring. I am from here. My father sold ropes."

The son said nothing.

"Then in February," the old man said, "Sotíris comes again. He has a book. A big book, blue, cloth. Heavy. He puts it on my table. He says, Uncle, look, look what they have, the islanders, a hundred years of water, every Sunday. He is laughing. He is a little drunk. He says the boss wants it, the boss will keep it safe, the boss will put it in his museum one day under a glass with a little light." The old man's mouth twisted. "He says it as a joke. Under a glass. With a little light."

"Where did he take it?" the son said. It was the second question. He had promised one. He asked it anyway, very quietly, and the old man did not seem to notice.

"To the island. To the boss's building. The old press. He said the boss has a room there with a safe in the wall, for the important things, and only the boss has the number." The old man took his hand off the door frame. He looked at the son, really looked at him, for the first time, at his young face and his notebook and his sneakers. "You are not a student."

"I am a student."

"You are not only a student."

The son did not answer.

The old man nodded slowly, as if that were an answer. He looked back into his room, at the canary, at the silent game show, at the oilcloth on the table where a blue book had lain once in February, a hundred years of somebody else's Sundays.

"I am seventy-one," he said. "My wife is dead. My daughter does not call. I sold an island I never saw for twenty thousand euros and a little peace." He began, slowly, to close the door. "Tell them," he said, through the narrowing gap, "on that island, tell them I am sorry. Tell them my father was a ropemaker. Tell them I am not a merchant. There was never any merchant."

The door closed. The son heard the lock turn, and then, after a moment, the second lock, and then the chain.

He stood on the dark landing a while longer. Then he went down the stair and out into the bright street, where Iríni was waiting against the wall in the shade with her phone, and she looked at his face once and put the phone away and did not ask anything at all. They walked back down through the marble streets to the harbor, past the shops of powdered sweets and the men with bread on poles, and caught the afternoon boat, which was not the same night, as he had promised, but sooner.

On the boat he told her everything, and then he sat at the rail and wrote it all down, every word the old man had said, while it was still in his ears, in the notebook, in order; and at the end of it, because he had promised to tell everything this time, he wrote: *I asked two questions. I promised one.*

Iríni read it over his shoulder. She did not say anything. But when he looked up she was smiling at the sea, very slightly, the way a teacher smiles at a pupil who has got an answer wrong in exactly the right way.

Cards on the Boatyard Roof

Kept private.

*He asked two questions. He promised me one. He wrote that down himself and showed it to me before I could ask, and I read it standing in the boatyard with the page in my hand, and I said nothing, because the right thing to say was "good" and I did not trust my voice to say it plainly. At his age I would have asked one question and left, as I was told, and I would have been proud of my obedience, and we would not now know where the book is. My father once told me that a son who only does what he is told is a very good tool. I have not wanted a tool. I have wanted this.*

---

On Tuesday afternoon a message came from a number in Nicosia that did not ring back.

It came to Iríni, not to Eight, on her old phone with the cracked screen, while they were sitting in the boatyard on two crates with the rally map spread on the bonnet of the green car, going through the *Kávos* for the ninth time. She read it, and read it again, and then handed the phone to Eight without a word.

It was in English. It was four lines.

*Stérna Holdings Ltd, Limassol. Incorporated December 2024. Sole beneficial owner: F. Dráganis, passport no. withheld. Galáni Blue's limited partners have not been told. They believe the 4.2 went to an heir. They are not people who like to learn things late.*

There was no signature. Below it, a second message, a phone number, with a country code Eight did not recognize at once, and beside it a single word: *Treasurer.*

Eight gave the phone back.

"Your friend at the bank," he said.

"My friend at the bank has a friend at another bank." Iríni put the phone in her jacket. "Who has a sister who once had a very bad year, and someone helped, and nobody ever found out who." She looked at him sideways with her silver eyes. "You see how it goes. It is like a river under the ground. You do not see it. Then you dig a well and there it is."

"Stérna," said Eight.

"It means cistern. A tank, for keeping water." Iríni almost smiled. "He has a sense of humor. That is always a mistake in a thief."

Eight looked at the map on the bonnet of the car, at the island shaped like a closed hand, at the red lines of the stages running over it, and at the small square east of the harbor that he had marked in pencil, very lightly, a week ago, with a single dot.

"So he stole from the people he works for," he said. "Four million and fifty thousand of their money, for a spring that already belonged to someone else, paid to a man above a phone shop, who passed it to a company that is only him."

"Yes."

"And they don't know."

"Not yet." Iríni folded the map along its creases. "That is a dangerous thing, a man who has stolen from people who do not know yet. He has to win, so that when they look, there is something to show them worth more than what he took. If the island stops him, they look. And they find Stérna." She put the folded map on the bonnet. "And then he is not a man who lost an island. He is a man who stole from them."

Eight did not say anything for some time.

"Who are they?" he said finally.

"I do not know. Nobody knows. That is the kind of people they are." Iríni stood up. "The kind whose money is very old in some places and very new in others, and who do not appear in photographs, and who have treasurers with telephone numbers that do not ring back." She shouldered her bag. "I am going to the kafeneío to drink a coffee and read the newspaper like a retired woman. I would like to not know what you are thinking now. Please do not tell me."

---

Lefterís Gavalás came down to the boatyard at six, as he did every evening, to sit on his crate with his small glass and look at the ribs of the boat on the slipway.

Eight sat with him. They did not talk at first. The light was going gold over the harbor, and the painted boats lay on the water in their colors, and the swallows were going over in long swoops, low, after the evening insects. On the slipway the bare ribs of the new boat stood up from their keel, pale and clean, and the old man looked at them the way some men look at a fire.

"You knew the press," Eight said, after a while. "When it was working."

"Of course." The old man drank. "Everybody. Every November, the olives. Every family brings its sacks. On the donkeys, along the shore. Then the trucks. The steam, the smoke, the smell." He breathed in through his nose, as if it were still there. "You go in, it is warm, it is dark, the oil comes out green, like the sea in winter. Bitter. You put it on bread there, hot, with salt." He shook his head. "My wife's father was the manager. The last one. Antónis. From 1951 until it closed. He had an office upstairs, at the back, with a window onto the floor, so he could see the men working. And a safe in the wall. Iron. From England. Big as an oven." He held his hands apart. "With a wheel on the front."

"A combination."

"Yes." The old man laughed, suddenly, a short dry bark. "Antónis was a funny man. He said a combination should be a number nobody can forget and nobody would ever guess. So he used the day the steam press first ran. The fourth of November, 1904. Four. Eleven. Zero, four." He drank. "Everybody on the island knows that day. There is a stone over the door with it carved. But nobody ever thinks a man would be so stupid as to use the day carved over the door. So nobody ever tried." He laughed again. "When the press closed, the safe was empty, and they left it. Too heavy to move. In the wall. Nearly fifty years."

"Is it still there?"

"The company has it now. Everything is the company's." The old man looked at him sideways, for the first time, a long, slow, considering look, with his pencil behind his ear and his glass in his hand. "I hear the man from the company had a locksmith come from Athens, in the spring, to open it. Because he likes old things. He likes to have old things in his house that he can show people. The locksmith opened it in one hour and told him the number." He finished the glass. "I do not know if he changed it. A man who uses an old safe because it is beautiful, perhaps he keeps the old number because it is beautiful too."

Eight looked at the ribs of the boat on the slipway.

"Why are you telling me this?" he said.

Lefterís Gavalás set the empty glass down on the concrete beside his crate, carefully, so that it did not fall.

"My grandfather," he said, "lifted a stone every Sunday for forty years, so the water would go into a widow's channel. A widow from Smyrna, who was nothing to him. Who came on a boat with nothing." He looked at the harbor. "Everybody on this island has been telling you things. The warden. Elpída. The teacher. Pópi. My granddaughter. We do not know what you will do with them. We do not want to know." He stood up, slowly, a hand on his knee. "But a man who comes in the passer-by's hour, he does not have to explain himself. That is the custom. You give him the water, and you do not ask what he will grow."

He went up the hill in the evening light, hands pushed into his pockets, and did not look back. Later, on the island's calendar, the teacher put in the panigýri for the last Saturday of the month, as he did every year, as if the water were already coming.

---

That night, Eight and the son drew the cards on the roof of the boatyard.

The shed had a flat roof at the back, over the stores, which you reached by a ladder from inside, and from it you could see the whole harbor and the whole valley and the whole sky. It was after midnight. The harbor was black and still, the single light on the end of the mole making a long, shaking, golden road across the water, and the stars went from horizon to horizon in a pale river so thick in places it looked like smoke.

His father had a box of plain white cards and two pens. He had brought them up in his jacket pocket, and set them on the warm concrete of the roof between them, and a small flashlight with a red lens so it would not spoil their eyes.

"How many?" the son said.

"How many families on the cloth?"

The son counted in his head. He had looked at it long enough. "Twenty-three. Morning and afternoon. Plus the mill. Plus the widow."

"And the warden. And the old man with the violin. And Elpída. And the teacher. And the boatbuilder. And his granddaughter. And Pópi. And the woman in Chicago." His father took a card off the pile. "And some we don't know yet."

"Fifty?"

"Draw fifty."

His father uncapped a pen. He drew the first one himself, there, in the red light, without hurrying: a single line, the pen never lifting, looping left, crossing itself, looping right, and closing on its own beginning. His line was steady and dark and exactly even all the way round. He set it aside, face down, on the concrete.

Then he pushed the pile across to the son, and gave him the other pen.

The son looked at the blank card.

He had drawn one before, on Jeju, a year ago, on a guesthouse roof very much like this one, and his line had shaken at the top of the right loop, and his father had said, *Your grandfather's do that. In the same place*, and he had thought about that sentence on more nights since than he would ever own up to. He had not drawn one since. He had not been asked.

"All of them?" he said.

"As many as you want. I'll draw the rest."

The son uncapped the pen. He set it on the card. He drew.

The line went round, and crossed, and went round, and at the top of the right loop it shook, a little, the way it had on Jeju. He looked at it. He did not say anything. He set it aside, face down, on top of his father's, and drew another.

They drew without talking. The harbor slept below them. Somewhere up the valley a dog barked and stopped. Once a fishing boat came in late round the end of the mole with its engine putting softly and its single masthead light swaying, and went to its mooring, and the engine stopped, and a man's voice said something quiet across the water and another man's voice laughed. The son's cards piled up beside him. By the twentieth, the shake at the top of the right loop had gone smaller. By the thirtieth, he could not always find it. He did not know whether he was glad or sorry.

"Dad," he said, at the thirty-fourth.

"Mm."

"What happens to him? After?"

His father did not stop drawing.

"To Dráganis."

"Yes."

His father finished the card he was on, and set it on the pile, and capped the pen, and sat with it in his hand looking out over the dark harbor.

"I'm going to take the book back," he said. "From his safe. On Saturday night, while he's on his boat with the other drivers, and the island is at the rally dinner, and you're there too, where everyone can see you. The book goes to Syros on Monday morning, with Elpída's cloth and the old woman's card and your page from the archive, and the teacher files it with the court before the thirtieth. That's the island's. That's theirs to do. That's what they've been doing since April without knowing it."

"And him?"

"While I'm in his safe," his father said, "I'm going to photograph whatever's in there about a company called Stérna. And on Sunday night, when the rally's over, those photographs are going to two places. One is a prosecutor in Ermoupoli. The other is a telephone number that doesn't ring back, belonging to the people whose money he took." He turned the capped pen over in his fingers. "What they do then isn't mine to decide. It isn't yours. It's between him and them. He chose them. He chose to steal from them. I'm only going to make sure they find out on Sunday instead of next year."

The son was quiet.

"That's not nothing," he said at last. "Telling them."

"No," said his father. "It's not nothing."

"Would you do it if you didn't have to?"

His father looked at him in the red light.

"I don't have to," he said. "That's the point. The island will get its water back on Monday whether I make that call or not. The book does that. The call is something else." He set the pen down. "I'm going to make it because he will do this again, to another island, if he's allowed to walk away. Because the next island might not have a woman who embroidered the hours at thirteen, or another in Chicago who remembers them at eighty-four. Because I have seen men like him walk away from places like this a dozen times in my life with nothing worse than a bad week." He paused. "And because I'm not sure it's right, and I'm going to do it anyway, and I wanted you to know that. That I'm not sure. That sometimes you aren't, and you do the thing, and you carry it."

The son looked down at the card in front of him. Blank. He had stopped in the middle of the pile.

"Granddad," he said. "When he said, *When you've given away something you wanted to keep.*"

"Yes?"

"Is it this? The not being sure?"

His father did not answer. The stars went over. The light at the end of the mole made its long shaking golden road on the black water.

"I think," said his father finally, "that's a question for your grandfather."

He uncapped his pen again and drew another card. The son watched his father's line go round, and cross, and go round, and come back to where it started. Then he drew his own, and set it on the pile, and drew the next, and they went on together until the box was empty, and there were fifty cards on the warm concrete of the boatyard roof, face down, in two piles that were not quite the same height.

When they had finished, his father picked up both piles and squared them together into one, without looking at which was which, and put the whole deck in his jacket.

"You won't know which are mine," the son said.

"No."

"Is that on purpose?"

His father rose, his knees popping, and he looked out at the harbor and the sleeping boats and the long dark valley going up to the gray square at the head of it, where, if you listened hard enough, in the perfect silence of one in the morning, you could just hear a pump.

"Yes," he said.

Many Years

For anyone who asks.

*People ask why I always race with the 8. The answer I give is that it is the shape a car draws on a wet skidpan when you are learning to hold a slide: round one way, across, round the other, and back to where you began. Every driver spends a winter drawing eights on a skidpan somewhere. That is true. It is not all of it, and the people who ask usually know that, and they are kind enough not to ask again. A number is a small thing to inherit. It is also, sometimes, the only thing.*

---

On the morning of the seventeenth of September, the door at the top of the village stood open from seven o'clock, and by eight the stair below it was full.

The son had never seen anything like it. Pópi had told him, and Fotiní had told him, and he had nodded and written it down and not understood it at all. On an island, on your name day, you do not invite. Everybody comes. He had pictured a few neighbors with a cake. He had not pictured the whole of Kryovrýsi climbing a stair so narrow you could touch both walls, in a slow, talking, laughing, single-file line that went down past the house under the third terrace and round the corner by the shop and out of sight, every one of them in clean clothes, every one of them carrying something.

They carried plates covered with cloths. They carried small paper parcels tied with string. They carried, in two cases, a live chicken, upside down, by the feet, which went into a basket at the top of the stair without comment. The old men carried nothing but themselves, in jackets, with their caps in their hands. The children carried flowers from the few gardens where anything still grew: geraniums, mostly, red and pink, snapped off at the stem, and a single late rose, and an armful of wild fennel, gone to seed, yellow and smelling of aniseed, which a boy of about seven held in front of his face like a shield and would not give to anyone but Kyría Elpída herself.

The son went up in the line with Stav and Kóstas, in front of the retired vet with the new hip, who went up one step at a time and would not be helped. Pávlos went ahead with the tablet so that two great-nephews in Melbourne could say it too.

At the green door, the line went in, one by one.

---

The long low room was full of people and full of cloth and full of light. They had opened the shutters on both sides, so the sun came in at one end and the wind at the other, and the embroidery on the walls stirred in the draught, all of it at once, the birds and the ships and the women holding hands, as if the room were breathing.

Kyría Elpída sat at her table by the window in a black dress the son had not seen before, with a narrow border of dark red at the cuffs, and a fresh white scarf, and her glasses like ships' windows pushed up on her forehead. On the table in front of her, instead of the hoop and the needle, there was a tray. On the tray stood a dozen small glasses of water, each with a little dish beside it, and in each dish, a single spoonful of something dark and glistening in syrup.

Each person came in, and went to the table, and bent down, and kissed her on both cheeks, or took her hand in both of theirs, and said the same two words.

"*Chrónia pollá.*"

Many years.

Then they put their plate or their parcel or their chicken or their fennel down somewhere, on the bed, on the chest, on the floor by the wall, wherever there was room; and she said something to each of them, short, and sometimes they laughed and sometimes she did; and they took a dish from the tray, and ate the spoonful of dark syrup, and drank the glass of water after it, all of it, and set the empty glass back on the tray; and Pópi, standing by the table, filled it again from a big clay jug and set another spoonful in another dish; and the person went and stood against the wall of cloth with the others, and talked, and the next person came in.

"*Glykó tou koutalioú,*" Pópi said, when the son reached the table. "A spoon sweet. You eat it in one spoon and then the water. Always the water. This is bitter orange. From her own tree. She makes it every winter." She put the little dish in his hand. "The water is from her cistern. Under the house. Rain from the roof, from last winter. Not from the Mána." She looked at the son over her glasses. "This year, no Mána. So this year, everybody drinks her rain."

He bent down to the old woman. He did not know whether to kiss her. She solved it for him, reaching up and taking his face between her two dry, small, strong hands, and pulling it down, and kissing him on both cheeks, hard, like a stamp on a document.

"*Chrónia pollá,*" he said.

She said something back, and Pópi laughed.

"She says your Greek is like a dog walking on its back legs. She says it is not good but she is amazed you can do it at all."

He ate the spoonful. It was dark and sticky and bitter and sweet at once, a curl of orange peel candied so long it had gone soft and almost clear, like stained glass, and the syrup round it tasted of the peel and of something else, cloves maybe, and it filled his whole mouth with a taste like autumn. He drank the water after it. It was cool and soft and very slightly flat, the way rainwater is, and tasted of stone, and of nothing.

"Tell her," he said to Pópi, "Mrs. Margaríti says *chrónia pollá* from Chicago. And she says to tell her the diamonds are square now."

Pópi told her.

The old woman stopped. She looked up at the son with her bright eyes, and her face, inside the white scarf, did something complicated. Then she threw back her head and laughed her pullet's laugh, high and cackling, so loud that the whole room turned round, and she slapped the table, and the little glasses on the tray jumped and rang, and she said something to the room at large, and the whole room laughed with her, though most of them could not possibly have known why.

"She says," said Pópi, wiping her eyes, "that Fotiní Margaríti unpicked the same row of diamonds eleven times in 1950 and cried every time, and she, Elpída, made her do it a twelfth, and she has been waiting seventy-six years for Fotiní to admit they were crooked. She says now she can die happy. She says not today, though. Today there is too much food."

---

There was too much food: cheese pies folded into triangles; semolina cakes soaked in syrup; chickpeas cooked overnight in a clay pot in somebody's bread oven until they tasted of smoke; a grilled octopus cut into curls, with oil and oregano; figs everywhere. By eleven the room was so full that people had begun to spill out of the door onto the top of the stair and sit on the steps in the sun with plates on their knees, and somebody had brought up a demijohn of wine from a cellar, and somebody else a bottle of clear spirit that the old men passed from hand to hand in tiny glasses and drank in one swallow and gasped at.

At eleven, Andréas came up the stair with the laouto on his back, and sat on the top step, and began to play, softly, not the water tune, just island tunes, one after another, running into each other, and some of the children began to dance on the flat roof of the house below, in a ring, holding hands, the way the women held hands on the cloth on the wall.

Stav went and sat beside Andréas on the step. He had his violin. He had brought it, as he brought it everywhere, because he still could not believe anyone on this island would let him put it down. Andréas looked at him and nodded at the case, and Stav took it out, and joined in, and the old women on the steps turned to look at the boy from Chicago playing their tunes, and one of them called out something, and Andréas grinned.

"She says," Pópi said, beside the son, "he plays like Pétros Margarítis's great-grandson. She says that is not a compliment, because Pétros could not keep time either."

---

Just before noon, two young men in blue T-shirts came up the stair, single file, against the flow, carrying a case of blue glass bottles between them and, on top of the case, an arrangement of flowers so large that they had to turn sideways to get it through the door.

The room went quiet.

They set it down in front of Kyría Elpída: white lilies and white roses in a basket wrapped in blue ribbon, and the scent of them smothered the figs and the bitter orange at once. On the ribbon there was a card. Pópi bent and read it aloud, in a flat voice.

"*To Kyría Elpída Vasilákou, the oldest woman of Askýra, on her name day. With respect and affection, from her friends at Galáni Blue Partners and Askyra Springs. Many years.*"

The old woman looked at the flowers. She looked at the case of blue bottles under them, twenty-four of them, each with its label: the drop of water with the mountain inside it, and the little drawing of the fountain, the four spouts, the birds, the tree, the fish.

Then she said something, quite quietly, to Pópi.

Pópi turned to the two young men in blue T-shirts, who were standing by the door, not quite knowing whether to leave, and spoke to them in Greek, politely, at some length. The young men went red. One of them said something. Pópi answered. Then the two of them picked up the case of bottles, with the flowers still on top of it, and carried it back out of the door, sideways, and down the stair, through the people sitting on the steps, who moved their plates and their knees to let them pass and watched them go all the way down and round the corner by the shop without saying a word.

"What did she say?" the son asked.

Pópi filled another little glass from the clay jug and put it on the tray.

"She said, thank the company, and tell them that on her name day she gives water to her guests, she does not take it. She said, take the bottles down to the harbor and give them to the rally drivers, who are thirsty, and not from here, and do not know what they are drinking." Pópi set a spoonful of bitter orange beside the glass. "And she said the flowers smell like a funeral, and she is not dead yet, so give them to somebody who is."

---

His father came at one.

The son did not see him come up the stair. He only saw, at one point, that his father was in the room: standing against the wall of cloth by the door, in his plain shirt, with his cap in his hand like the old men, waiting his turn, among the islanders, in the line.

When it came, he went to the table, and bent, and took the old woman's hand.

"*Chrónia pollá,*" he said.

Kyría Elpída looked up at him.

She did not take his face in her hands. She did not laugh. She looked at him for a while from under the white scarf, with her bright eyes, a long and very steady look, the son thought, as if she were reading something written on him very small; and the room, which had been loud, went quieter, the way rooms do when the oldest person in them is looking hard at something.

Then she said a single word, and reached under the table, into a basket at her feet, and brought out something, and put it in his hand.

It was a small cloth bag, the size of a fist, made of the same cream linen as the runner on the wall, worked round its mouth with a narrow band of red and blue diamonds, perfectly square, and tied with a red thread. It rattled faintly.

She spoke. Pópi translated, slowly.

"She says these are seeds. *Fáva*, the little yellow pulse of Askýra that the purée is made from. Her mother's, and her mother's mother's. The island has grown it on the terraces since before there were names in the book. Every year she keeps a handful, in case the year is bad. This year is bad." Pópi stopped, and listened, and went on. "She says the boy told Pópi, and Pópi told her, that you have a wife at home by another sea who asked you to bring her something she can put in the ground. She says these are for your wife. She says they like wind and they like poor soil and they like to be left alone. She says your wife will understand them."

Eight looked down at the little cloth bag in his hand.

He did not say anything for a moment. The son, watching him from across the room, saw his father's face hold still in the way it always held still; and then he saw it do something else, which it almost never did, which was give way, very slightly, around the mouth, for less than a second, before it came back.

"*Efcharistó,*" his father said. Thank you. Very quietly.

The old woman nodded once, satisfied, and let go of his hand, and turned to the next person in the line, who was the retired vet with the new hip, and told him he was late.

---

The son found his father afterward on the stair, a little way down, sitting on a step in the sun between a fisherman and a woman with a plate of cheese pies, eating one, and looking out over the roofs of the village at the dry valley and the sea.

He sat down beside him.

"Mom's going to cry," he said.

"Probably."

"She's going to plant them by the roses. In the wind."

"Probably that too." His father ate the rest of the cheese pie. He took the little cloth bag out of his shirt pocket and looked at it again, at the square red and blue diamonds round its mouth. "She asked me for something that grows here. Not a picture. Something she could put in the ground." He put it back. "I hadn't found anything. I've been looking for two weeks. Everything here is dying."

"Not this."

"No." His father looked down the valley. "Not this."

Below them, on the roof of the house below the stair, the children were still dancing in their ring, holding hands, going round, and Andréas and Stav were still playing, and from somewhere far down the hill, from the harbor, very faint, came the sound of an engine — not a car, a boat, a big one, with two deep engines, coming round the end of the mole into the bay, slow and white and enormous, with a helicopter on its upper deck under a blue cover, and a flag at its stern, and a name on its bow in tall blue letters that the son could read even from here.

*GALÍNI.*

"Calm," said his father, without being asked. "It means the calm sea." He stood up. "He's brought his boat for the rally. He'll moor it in the bay, so the drivers can see it from the paddock."

"Saturday night," said the son.

"Saturday night." His father put his cap back on. "Tomorrow there's scrutineering. Tomorrow night there's the first stage, on the harbor, in front of everybody." He looked down at the son on the step. "I'll need you at the start line tomorrow night. Not with me. With the family. Where everyone can see you having a good time."

"I can do that."

"I know you can." His father turned and began to go down the stair, between the people sitting on it, stepping round their plates and their glasses and their knees, nodding to them, a retired man in a cap going down a village stair on a name day. Halfway down, he stopped, and turned, and looked back up at the son.

"Your grandmother," he said. "Mine. My father's mother. She used to say that on any day of celebration you should give away one thing you'd rather keep. So that the year would know you meant it." He paused. "I'd forgotten that. Until just now. Until the bag."

He went on down the stair and was gone past the shop, and the son sat on the step in the sun with the plate of cheese pies beside him and the dancing children below and the white boat coming in across the bay, and took out his notebook, and wrote down what his father had said, word for word; and then, after a while, under it, *She said keep. He said give away. I think they mean the same thing.*

Super Special

Kept private.

*On the roof on Tuesday night my son drew twenty-five cards, and by the end I could not find the shake in his line. I looked for it. I wanted to find it. My father's cards shake at the top of the right loop because his hand has shaken there for twenty years, and when I first saw the same small tremor in the boy's card in Korea I felt something I have no name for, as if a voice I knew had spoken out of a stranger's mouth. Now his hand is learning steadiness, and I am glad for him, and I mixed the two piles together so that I will never know which are his. I did that for him. I also did it so I would not keep looking.*

---

Scrutineering began on Friday at nine on the concrete apron of the harbor, and by ten the whole of Skála had come down to walk among the cars.

The cars stood in rows behind steel barriers in the hard morning light with their bonnets up, and the island walked up and down between them with its hands behind its back, looking.

There were twenty-nine cars. The son, walking the rows with Stav and Kóstas and Chrysa, counted them twice. He did not know most of them, and Chrysa did not know any, and Stav knew all of them from the internet and could not stop telling everyone.

"That's an Ascona. Opel. The kind that won the world championship in '82. That's a 911. That's a Fiat 131 Abarth. Those things were monsters on gravel." He stopped in front of a tiny red box of a car with a white roof and spotlights on its bonnet, a car so small that the driver, a heavy man of about seventy in overalls, appeared to be wearing it rather than sitting in it. "And that's a Mini. Like, an actual Mini. In a rally. On *those roads*."

"He drove it here from Thessaloníki," said Chrysa, who had been talking to the driver's wife. "On the ferry. He has driven it in every historic rally in Greece for thirty years. His wife says he has never finished one, and he has never once been last."

There were Japanese cars, low and neat. There was a long blunt-nosed red sports car from the seventies with a growling straight six, and a boxy old Volvo driven by two Swedish brothers who had come down through Europe in it and slept in it in the paddock. There was the white BMW, with Dimítra Kanáki underneath it on a creeper and her co-driver, a small bearded man with very thick glasses, reading the pace notes aloud to her in a low monotone while she worked.

And there were two cars that nobody walked past without stopping.

At the end of the row nearest the sea, under the company's blue tent with a carpet and a generator of its own and two mechanics in blue overalls with the Galáni logo on their backs, sat the Stratos. The mechanics had the engine cover off. Inside, in the middle of the car, behind where the driver sat, lay the engine, a tangle of polished aluminum and red-painted cam covers and six bright trumpets standing up in a row, and every few minutes one of the mechanics started it, and the sound came out of it like tearing silk, high and hard and smooth, and the whole harbor turned round to look.

Dráganis was not there. He was on his boat, out in the bay, the big white yacht at anchor a few hundred meters off the mole, with its helicopter under its cover. Kósmas stood under the blue tent with his arms folded and watched the crowd go by.

And in the middle of the row, in front of the boatyard, by itself, sat the green-gray Escort.

It had no tent, only a canvas sheet stretched from the boatyard roof to two poles, and under it Barba Lefterís on a crate with his pencil behind his ear, and Iríni on another with her notebooks. The engine inside was smaller than the Stratos's and plainer, four cylinders standing upright under a black cam cover with two big carburetors bolted to its side, their mouths covered with mesh, and it did not look like jewelry at all. It looked like a tool that had been used.

People stopped in front of it anyway. They stopped because of the color, Chrysa said, the olive-leaf color, which every islander over the age of sixty recognized from somewhere without being able to say where. And they stopped because Barba Lefterís was sitting beside it, which meant it was the island's, somehow, in a way none of the other cars were.

The son's father was not there either. He had gone with the car to the scrutineers' tent at nine, and come back at ten with a sticker on the windscreen that said *PASSED*, and gone away again along the harbor, and the son had not seen him since.

---

The scrutineers were two men from Athens and a woman from Patras with a clipboard and a torch and a face that had never in its life been impressed.

They checked the cage, tapping every weld with a little hammer and listening, and the harnesses and the dates stamped on them, and the extinguisher and the cutoff switch. The woman from Patras lay on her back on the concrete and ran her finger along the seam where the shell had been welded, and looked at her finger. Then the papers: the car's history, the homologation, the long typed letter from Cumbria with no signature.

The woman from Patras read the letter twice. She looked at the car. She looked at Eight.

"Who built it?" she said, in English.

"A friend."

"Your friend is very good." She handed the papers back. "Your friend does welds like my father did. Nobody does welds like that now." She made a note on her clipboard. "Your friend does not want her name on the papers."

"No."

"I understand." She peeled a sticker off a roll, and smoothed it onto the windscreen with her thumb. "My father did not want his name on anything either. He said a good weld signs itself." She stepped back. "Passed. Good luck tonight. Do not hit the octopus man."

"The octopus man?"

"He is on the mole every evening at seven, beating an octopus on the rocks. For the restaurants. The stage goes past him at the turn at the end of the mole. The organizers asked him to move tonight. He said no." She shrugged. "It is an island."

---

The first stage of the Askyra Springs Historic Rally began at eight o'clock on Friday night, in the dark, on the harbor.

The organizers called it the super special. It was two kilometers and a hundred meters long, and it was not a road at all. It was the whole waterfront of Skála under floodlights: from a gantry by the boatyard, along the front past the kafeneío, round a hairpin of straw bales, up the first three switchbacks of the valley road and down again, and then out along the mole, a narrow strip of concrete between the harbor and the open sea, round the light at the very end, and back. Every car ran it alone, a minute apart, in about two minutes.

The whole island was there, and a ferry-load of spectators from Syros and Tinos, packed along the barriers, sitting on the harbor wall with their legs over the water, hanging out of upstairs windows. The kafeneío had put every chair it owned on its terrace and was charging for them. Somebody had brought a drum. On the end of the mole, beyond the turn, in the dark at the edge of the floodlights, the son could see a single small figure, crouched on the rocks, raising one arm and bringing it down, raising it and bringing it down, beating an octopus on the stone.

He stood where his father had asked him to stand: at the barrier in front of the kafeneío, in the light, with Kóstas and Stav and Pópi and her husband, with a paper cone of hot chickpea fritters in his hand that Pópi had bought him, laughing at something Stav had said, visible to anyone on the whole harbor who might want to look.

He did not look at the start line. He had promised.

He looked anyway.

The cars went off slowest first. The Mini went first, and the heavy old man drove it as if he were trying to throw it into the sea, its tiny engine screaming and its spotlights blazing, round the light at the end on what looked like two wheels, and through the finish in two minutes and fourteen seconds, and when he climbed out with his arms in the air the whole island stood up.

Then the Volvo. Then the Japanese cars, neat and precise. Then the red sports car, which spun at the second hairpin and stalled in a cloud of its own tire smoke, and restarted. Then the 911, the Fiat, the Ascona.

Then the Escort.

The son heard it before he saw it. The bark of it at the start line, by the boatyard, at the far end of the front: the hard flat crack of the four-cylinder blipped once, twice, against the walls of the houses, and the sound of the carburetors gulping air under it, and then the countdown, the lights on the gantry going red, red, red, and green —

And the car came.

It came along the harbor front in the floodlights at a speed that did not seem possible between the barriers and the houses, the engine note going up into a hard rising scream, like a saw going into tin, cracking at each gear change, and the son felt it in his chest, and the car went past the kafeneío in front of him so close and so fast that the wind of it lifted his hair and took the smell of the fritters away and left behind it a smell of hot oil and raw fuel and scorched rubber, and it was gone toward the bales at the foot of the valley.

The hairpin. He saw it from behind. The car went into the bales flat out and then, at the last possible moment, the nose dipped under braking so hard he heard the tires shriek and saw the rear of the car go light, lift, start to come round — and his father let it come round. Let it swing. Let the tail of the car come out wide in a slow, deliberate, gorgeous arc, sideways, the rear wheels spinning and smoking and throwing up a white cloud into the floodlights, and the nose pointing up the valley road before the car had stopped going across the harbor, and then the engine screamed again and the car simply leapt out of the smoke and up the hill.

The crowd roared.

Up the switchbacks the son saw it only in pieces between the walls, headlights flaring on whitewash, tail out at every hairpin. Then it was coming down again, faster, the exhaust popping little blue flames he could see from the harbor as his father came off the throttle into each corner.

Back to the bales at the bottom. Round, tail out, smoke. And then the mole.

The car went out along the mole as if it were a runway, flat out, the floodlights going past so fast they made a single flickering line along its green-gray flank, and the son saw, at the end, the small crouched figure on the rocks beside the light stand up, and lift both arms, the octopus in one hand, and wave them over his head as the car went past him.

The turn round the light. A shriek. The tail coming round, very tight, so tight the son thought the car would hit the bales, and it did not; it went round the light on a line so close to the stone base that it seemed to be orbiting it, and came out pointing back along the mole with smoke pouring off its rear tires in a white curtain that hung in the floodlights over the black water, and the engine screamed, and it came back.

Back along the mole. Back past the boatyard. Through the finish.

*Two minutes, four seconds and six tenths.*

The board by the finish line flickered and showed it, and the harbor went mad.

The son found that he was shouting, and Stav, and Kóstas, and Pópi's silent husband, the other Kóstas, hammering on the barrier with both enormous hands. The fritters had gone somewhere into the dark.

---

Dimítra Kanáki went next, in the BMW, and the BMW was faster.

Its howl was smoother and higher, and she drove it with a precision that made his father's driving look like a sort of beautiful violence. She did not slide it round the bales. She placed it, every corner on the same line, as if drawn with a ruler, and went round the light so clean that it barely smoked at all. *Two minutes, four seconds, two tenths.* Four tenths faster. The harbor cheered her too, nearly as loud.

And then the Stratos.

Dráganis had come in off his boat in the afternoon, in white overalls with his name embroidered on the chest, signing programs for children, and he lifted a gloved thumb to the television camera before he pulled on his helmet.

At the start the Stratos did not bark. It shrieked, six cylinders ringing like a dozen voices in an empty concert hall, and the whole harbor flinched from it. The lights went red, red, red, green, and the wedge leapt off the line with its rear tires spinning and smoking and went along the front so fast and so low that it seemed to be flying a few centimeters above the concrete.

It was faster along the straight than either of the others, much faster. But it was not easy. At the bales at the foot of the valley the wedge went in too fast and twitched, and twitched again, its short tail snapping out one way and then the other, and the crowd gasped, and somehow it came round. Up the switchbacks the son could hear the engine screaming and then stuttering, screaming and stuttering, as the car went sideways and the driver caught it and lost it and caught it. On the mole it was a white streak. At the light at the end, it went round wide, far wider than the Escort or the BMW, and hit a bale with its tail, and a bale burst in a cloud of straw that hung in the floodlights like smoke, and the car came out of it anyway, and screamed back along the mole, and through the finish.

*Two minutes, three seconds, nine tenths.*

Fastest.

The harbor was silent for a moment. Then the rally crews on the far side, by the company's blue tent, began to cheer. And the islanders, after a while, gave it the same polite handful of claps they had given his speech.

Dráganis climbed out of the Stratos at the finish and pulled off his helmet and shook out his silver hair and held both arms up to the television camera, and grinned, white and wide, and the camera loved him.

The son looked down the harbor to the boatyard.

His father was standing beside the Escort, under the canvas sheet, helmet in the crook of his elbow, the fireproof hood rolled up off his face, talking quietly to Iríni. He did not look at the board. He did not look at the Stratos. He looked, for a moment, out past the end of the mole into the dark, where the big white boat lay at anchor in the bay with every light on its three decks blazing and a party already beginning on its upper deck, music coming faintly across the water. Then he bent and said something to Barba Lefterís, who nodded, and the two of them began, without any hurry, to change the car's wheels for gravel.

The Nineteen Red Words

For anyone who asks.

*On a dry gravel stage, the car that started a minute ahead of you is still there, in a way, long after it has gone. Its dust hangs over the road in a long pale wall, and if there is no wind it can hang for a minute, two minutes, so that you drive into a cloud with a corner somewhere inside it. You cannot see the corner. You have only the voice beside you saying where it is. People ask whether that frightens me. It did once. Now it is the part I would miss most. For those few seconds there is no road, no sea, no sky, nothing at all in the world but a voice and a wheel.*

---

On Saturday morning at seven the start of the *Kávos* stage was a dirt crossroads under the summit of the island, among thyme and rock, with a marshal's van and a timing hut on a trailer and a stone wall with three goats on it, and the wind had dropped.

That was the first thing Iríni said when they rolled up to the line. Not good morning. Not are you ready.

"No wind."

Eight looked at the thyme by the road. It was still. For the first time since they had come to the island the low gray cushions along the cliff edge were not leaning south. The air was absolutely still and already warm, the sky a hard pale blue without a cloud, and below them the sea on the north side had gone from navy and slate to a glassy dark blue, flat to the horizon, with no white on it anywhere.

"The meltémi is finished," Iríni said. She did not sound pleased. "That means the dust will hang." She opened the first notebook on her knee and found the page, and smoothed it flat with her gloved hand. "The car in front of us is the Fiat. One minute. On the *Kávos* in this air, we will be driving in his dust from the third kilometer. If he is slow, we will be in it until the end."

"Then we'll be in it."

"Then we will be in it." She looked at him sideways, through the open visor of her helmet, with her silver eyes. "Nineteen red words."

"I have them."

"Have them again."

The timing marshal leaned in at the window with his clipboard and his stopwatch and said something in Greek, and Iríni answered, and the marshal stepped back, and held up his hand, fingers spread. Five. Four. Eight felt the car under him, the engine at idle, rough and lumpy and alive, the whole shell trembling with it, the gear lever buzzing under his palm. Three. The smell of hot oil and fuel. Two. The goats on the wall, turning their heads to look. One.

The hand dropped.

He gave it everything, and the Escort went off the line in a fan of white gravel that rattled over the timing hut and the three goats, and they were gone.

---

"*Fifty, left four, keep in, over crest, a hundred.*"

Iríni's voice came into his helmet through the intercom, flat and even, a little ahead of the car. Not loud. Never loud. She did not need to be loud. She read the notes the way you might read a list of groceries to someone in another room, without any change in her voice for a hairpin or a straight, and the evenness of it went into him and settled there, like a hand on a horse's neck.

"*Right three, tightens, don't cut, rock inside. Into left five, long.*"

The Escort went over the first crest and the road dropped away under it and for a moment there was nothing under the front wheels at all, only air, and blue, and the sea far below, and then the car came down with a crunch onto the gravel and the suspension took it and the tail slid wide and he gathered it with a quarter-turn and his right foot and the car was already into the right three, sliding, the rear wheels throwing up a rooster-tail of white stones off the outside of the bend and over the edge into the void. He did not cut. There was a rock on the inside of the right three the size of an oven and it went past his window so close he could have touched it.

"*Left five, long, opens. Two hundred.*"

The road went out along the cliff, white and loose, with the sea a long way down on his left. Stones hammered the inside of the arches in a continuous roar, and the car moved under him all the time, its tail wandering, his hands making a hundred small corrections a minute without his telling them to.

"*Crest. Over jump. Keep right on landing.*"

He kept right on landing.

"*Left two. Edge. Red.*"

The first red word. He knew where it was before she said it, because he had driven it seven times at thirty kilometers an hour and had it in his hands, and he was already braking, hard, the nose diving, the tires sliding and grinding on the marbles, and he turned in and let the tail come round, and there was the edge, on the outside, just there: the gravel ending in a lip of crumbled rock, and beyond the lip nothing, eighty meters of nothing, and the sea at the bottom, flat and dark blue and very calm, with a fishing boat on it, small as a grain of rice. The car went round the left two with its rear wheels a meter from the lip and a spray of stones going off it into the air, and he felt the rear tires find the packed line under the loose stuff, bite, and drive, and they were out, and the edge was behind them.

"*Two hundred. Right four. Into left four. Caution, ruts.*"

---

By the third kilometer they were in the Fiat's dust.

It came up in front of them out of the still air like a wall: a long pale cloud lying across the road and along the cliff, white-gold in the low sun, hanging there, not moving, so thick at its heart that the road vanished inside it. He went into it at a hundred and twenty.

The world went white.

There was no road, no cliff, no sea. There was only the white pressed against the windscreen, and the chalky smell of crushed marble coating his tongue, and Iríni's voice.

"*Right four. Fifty. Left three, don't cut. Into right five.*"

He turned right where she said right. He did not see the corner. He felt the car turn, felt the road come round under it, felt the tail step out on the loose stones and come back, and the white went on, featureless, and somewhere inside it was the edge.

"*Long straight. Two hundred. Crest.*"

He trusted her. That was all it was. There was nothing else to do and nothing else in the world. He put his foot down where she said a straight was, into nothing but white, and the car went, and the needle went up, and the white went past the windows like the inside of a cloud, and he did not know whether the next thing would be the road or the sea.

"*Left two. Edge. Red.*"

He braked into the white, hard, and turned, and the tail came round, and for an instant, through a thin place in the dust, he saw the lip of the cliff go past his window, close, gold in the sun, and below it the sea, very blue and very far away — and then the white closed again, and they were round, and still on the road.

"*Good,*" said Iríni, in the same flat voice, and then, without a pause, "*Right three, tightens.*"

---

At the eleventh kilometer, the dust went red.

He saw it ahead of them, through the white: a stain, low down, near the road, dark orange, pulsing. And then the smell came into the car, different, sharp, the smell of burning oil and hot metal and something worse, rubber and plastic, and the white went gray around them and then dark, and Iríni's voice said, without any change at all:

"*Car off. Right side. Fire. Caution. Keep left.*"

It was not the Fiat. It was the red seventies sports car that had spun on the harbor the night before, a minute ahead of the Fiat, two minutes ahead of them: it was stopped on the right side of the road, on the inside of a bend, nose into the rock, and its long red bonnet was open and from under it came fire, a bright fierce orange fire, roaring, and from the fire came smoke, a thick black oily column of it that went straight up into the still air and then spread, flat, across the road at the height of a man, so that the Escort went into it as it would go into a tunnel.

Black. The inside of the car went black for a second, and the smell was thick and choking and the heat of the fire came through the glass of his side window like an oven door opening, and he saw, in the black, on the hillside above the burning car, two figures in fireproof overalls, standing, waving their arms, alive, whole, waving him on. Their helmets were off. One of them had a fire extinguisher. Both of them were alive.

He went through.

The smoke cleared behind them all at once like a curtain pulled open, and there was the white dust again, and the road, and the sea, and the sun, and the engine screaming, and Iríni's voice, unchanged, saying, "*Left four, over crest, a hundred,*" and he realized that he had not taken a breath since the fire and took one now, and it was full of marble dust and smoke, and he coughed, and drove.

---

They came out of the *Kávos* at the lighthouse in nine minutes, forty-one seconds and four tenths, and Iríni wrote the time on her card in pencil without comment and said only, "The Swedes have water," and the Swedish brothers, who had finished ahead of them and were standing beside their Volvo at the stop control with their helmets off and their faces caked white, threw them two bottles of water through the window, and he drank one in a single swallow and poured the other over his head.

The Stratos had done it in nine minutes, thirty-nine seconds, eight tenths.

The BMW, in nine minutes, forty-three seconds.

"He is driving without looking," said Iríni, reading the board at the stop control, where the times came up on a laptop on a folding table. "On the *Kávos*. In the dust. Faster than us by a second and a half." She took off her helmet and shook out her short gray hair. "He did not see the red words. He did not need to. He does not believe in them." She looked at Eight. "He will believe in them one day."

"Not today," said Eight.

"Not today," she agreed, and opened the next notebook.

---

The *Pezoúles* stage ran down through the middle of the island in the late morning heat, eleven kilometers of broken tarmac and gravel between dry-stone walls so close that the Escort's mirrors cleared them by a hand's width, past the dovecotes with the pigeons going up off them in clouds. On every wall the island sat and watched, with its legs over the road, as Iríni had said it would. Kyría Elpída, carried down by her nephew from Piraeus and installed on a kitchen chair on the wall of the Vasilákis terrace like a judge at a village show, with a parasol, who did not wave at any car, and did not need to.

And at the bottom, the stage went down into the valley of the mills, and along the dry stream bed, under the plane trees, past the eleven roofless mills in their line, so close that the Escort's engine note bounced off the stone of each mill as it passed and came back, and back, and back, an echo in a row, eleven times, like the stream going down through the wheels.

Eight drove it as hard as he had ever driven anything.

At the bottom the clock gave him a second and a half over the Stratos.

---

By six on Saturday evening, after the *Kávos* had been run a second time in the afternoon, with less dust and more wind and a puncture for the Fiat that put it out of the top ten, the board at the harbor showed it.

*1. Dráganis / Petrákis (Lancia Stratos). 2. [8] (Ford Escort RS1800), +2.1. 3. Kanáki / Toúmbas (BMW M3), +4.0.*

The square where the 8 was, where the name of the first driver should have been, was blank. He had asked for it to be blank, and the organizers, after a conversation with Iríni in the official tent that had lasted three minutes and involved no raised voices at all, had agreed.

Pópi had already sent a photograph of the board to the family in Chicago. The son looked at it from the barrier in front of the kafeneío. Then he looked at the end of the harbor, where the Escort stood under its canvas sheet with its bonnet up, white with dust from nose to tail, the olive-leaf green showing through only in streaks where Barba Lefterís had begun to wash it down with a bucket and a sponge, slowly, panel by panel, like a man washing a horse.

His father was sitting on a crate beside it with his overalls pulled down to his waist and the sleeves tied round him, drinking water, very still.

At seven a launch came in from the big white boat in the bay and tied up at the end of the mole, and a young man in a white uniform walked along the harbor to the boatyard with an envelope, and gave it to the son's father, and walked back.

The son watched his father open it, and read it, and fold it, and put it in his pocket.

He knew what it said. Everybody on the harbor knew what it said, because everybody had been invited: every driver and co-driver in the top ten, to dinner on the *Galíni*, at nine, as guests of Fílippos Dráganis, leader of the Askyra Springs Historic Rally.

His father stood up. He pulled his overalls off and folded them over the crate. He went into the boatyard shed, where he had a bucket and a tap and a clean shirt on a nail, and when he came out ten minutes later he was a retired man in a white shirt with his hair wet, going to dinner.

He passed the son at the barrier on his way along the harbor to the mole, and did not stop. But as he passed, without looking round, he said, very quietly, "Elpída's cloth. The book. Monday. Remember."

"I remember."

"And tonight, be at the kafeneío. All night. With everyone."

"I will."

His father walked on along the harbor, past the kafeneío, past the boats, to the end of the mole, where the white launch was waiting with its engine running, and stepped down into it, and the launch backed away from the mole and turned and went out across the darkening bay toward the big white boat with every light on its three decks burning and music coming off it across the water, and the son watched until he could not tell which of the figures in the stern of the launch was his father.

Beside him Stav said, "Is he going to be okay? At the party? With that guy?"

"He's going to have dinner," said the son. "And then he's going to come back, early, because he's tired. Because he's a retired man who drove all day on gravel and he's going to say his back hurts." He looked at the white boat. "Everybody's going to see him leave."

Stav looked at him.

"You sound like him," he said. "When you say stuff like that. Like you're reading it off something."

The son did not answer. He took out his notebook and wrote, in pencil, in the last of the light: *Saturday. Second, 2.1 behind. He is on the boat.* And the weather. *Still, warm. No wind. The meltémi has stopped.*

Then, under it, because he had promised to write everything: *I'm scared.*

The Book of the Water

Kept private.

*Before I went out to his boat I called my father. It was morning at home. I heard the sea behind him and the lane gravel under the lieutenant, so I knew he had walked down to the mailbox to take the call where my mother could not hear. I told him nothing about what I meant to do, and he did not ask. He said only, "Take what is theirs. Leave what is his. Touch nothing else." Then he said, "And come up the lane slowly when you come home. I want to see your face before your mother does." I have been going to him with questions like this since I was nineteen. He has never once told me what to do. He has only ever told me what not to forget.*

---

The *Galíni* was a hundred and ten feet long and lit like a theater, and the dinner was on its upper deck, under an awning of white canvas, at a long table set for twenty-four with silver and crystal and white flowers and small blue glass bottles of water at every place.

Eight sat where the steward put him, a third of the way down on the harbor side, between the Swedish brothers and the bearded co-driver of the BMW, who turned out to be a retired schoolmaster from Kozáni and who talked to him for an hour about Byzantine coins. Dimítra Kanáki sat across the table. She had come in a black dress and her rally boots, and she ate everything put in front of her with great concentration and said almost nothing, and once, when Dráganis at the head of the table was telling a long story about a race in Monaco, she caught Eight's eye across the crystal and the flowers and raised one eyebrow by perhaps a millimeter.

The food was very good and came in small pieces on large plates. Raw red prawns from Sými. A tartare of tuna. Lamb, again, from the island, Dráganis said, from a farmer on the north side who had been delighted to sell it. Sea urchins, opened at the table by a young man with a knife, their coral-orange insides glistening in their spines like the inside of a sunset. The wine was from Santoríni and very old and very cold.

Dráganis moved down the table with a glass in his hand, never sitting long. He told the old man with the Mini that he was the soul of the rally. He told Dimítra that her father would have been proud of her, and she thanked him without expression. And when he came to Eight, near eleven, he sat down in the empty chair beside him, the schoolmaster from Kozáni having gone to the rail to smoke, and leaned back with his glass, and looked at him with his pleasant brown eyes.

"Two point one," he said. "You are very good. On the *Pezoúles* you took a second and a half from me. Nobody takes a second and a half from me on a stage." He smiled. "I looked at the onboard. One of my mechanics has a camera on the wall at the mills. You go through the mills like water. I have never seen anyone drive a car like that. Like it is not a car."

"I've had a long time to practice."

"Yes. Where?" Dráganis turned his glass. "That is what I am curious about. My people looked for you. I told you, I made calls. A man with a real Cumbrian Escort who drives like that should be on every entry list in Europe for forty years. And there is nothing. A few rallies here and there, under an 8, with no name. A hill climb in Korea last year. Before that — " He made a small, elegant gesture with his free hand, opening the fingers, as if releasing a bird. "Smoke."

"I'm a private man."

"So am I." Dráganis laughed. "That is why I like you." He set the glass down on the white cloth. "My offer is double now. For the car. After tomorrow, win or lose. Double what I said last Saturday. And something more." He leaned in. "I am building a museum, you remember. Of the island. In the hotel. Boats, engines, photographs. And — I will tell you, because you are a man who appreciates such things — I have something special for it. An old book. A ledger. The islanders kept it for more than a hundred years, the hours of the water, every Sunday, in the hand of the old wardens. It is very beautiful. Very moving. It will be in the center of the museum, under glass, with a little light." He smiled. "I will put your car beside it. The old water and the old car. The history of Askýra. People will stand in front of it and cry."

Eight looked at him.

"Where did you find it?" he said. "The book."

"It found me," said Dráganis. "These things do." He stood up, and clapped Eight on the shoulder, and picked up his glass. "Think about it. Double. And a place in the history of the island." He moved on down the table, his hand already out to the next guest, his voice already warm.

---

At half past eleven Eight stood up from the table, slowly, with a hand at the small of his back, and apologized to the schoolmaster from Kozáni and to the Swedes, and went to find the steward, and asked, with some embarrassment, whether the launch might take an old man back to the harbor, because two stages of gravel at his age had done something to a disc in his lower back that he would rather not discuss at dinner.

The steward was very sympathetic. Dráganis, at the head of the table, called down the length of it that the Escort must go and rest, that he needed his rival in one piece tomorrow, that there was no glory in beating a man with a bad back; and the whole table laughed, kindly, and some of them called good night, and Dimítra Kanáki, across the crystal and the flowers, did not laugh at all, but watched him go, with her chin on her hand.

The launch took him back across the black bay to the end of the mole. He walked along the harbor slowly, with his hand at his back, past the kafeneío, where the whole island seemed to be, every table full, music playing, Andréas on the laouto in the corner and the son at a table by the door with Stav and Kóstas and Pópi, laughing, visible, playing Stav the word list on his phone, Kyría Elpída saying *mýlos* in her dry clear voice. The son did not look up as his father passed. That was right.

Eight went into the boatyard, and up the ladder to his room over the stores, and turned on the light, and stood at the window for a minute so that anyone looking could see an old man in a white shirt rubbing his back. Then he turned the light off.

He went out the back of the boatyard, down the slipway, past the pale ribs of the new boat, onto the shingle, and along the shore in the dark.

---

The old olive press stood black against a sky full of stars, two kilometers east, with a single light burning over the loading bay of the white warehouse beside it, and in the window of the little guard's cabin by the gate, the blue flicker of a phone.

He had been here on the Thursday of the week before, at two in the morning, and on that night he had found what he needed: not a door, but a hole. On the seaward side of the old building, low down, beside the base of the tall square chimney, there was an iron hatch a meter wide, rusted shut by nearly fifty years of sea air, where the coal had once been shoveled in for the boiler of the steam press. The company had re-roofed half the building and put steel doors on the seaward front and a camera over the gate and a camera over the loading bay, and nobody had thought about the coal hatch, because nobody had used it since 1978 and nobody living remembered it was there, except a boatbuilder whose wife's father had once managed the press. On Thursday, Eight had spent an hour on his knees in the dark with a can of penetrating oil and a small pry bar wrapped in cloth. Tonight the hatch opened when he lifted it, with a sound no louder than a sigh.

He went in on his stomach, feet first, and dropped a meter into the dark onto a floor of old coal dust and broken brick, and stood up, and waited for his eyes.

The boiler room. A great black iron shape, the old boiler, crouched in the middle of it like a sleeping animal, and pipes going up into the dark, and a doorway in the far wall with a faint blue light beyond it.

He went through the doorway onto the pressing floor.

The millstones stood upright in their basins, lit from below with blue light, glowing in the dark like the bones of something enormous. The silence was total. He could hear the sea, very faintly, through the stone, and, from somewhere far behind the walls, in the white warehouse, the hum of the bottling line's cooling fans, left running overnight.

He went down the hall between the millstones, keeping to the shadows on the left, and up the new wooden stair to the gallery.

The door at the top had a keypad. The small red light glowed on it.

He took a torch out of his pocket, a narrow one with a red lens, and shone it, very low, almost flat, across the face of the keypad, so that the light lay along the buttons sideways.

Most of them were clean. Three of them were not. On three of them, under the low red light, he could see the dull, faint smear that skin leaves on plastic when the same fingers touch the same buttons every day: the 1, the 3, the 9. Three keys. For a four-digit code. One of them used twice.

He stood on the gallery in the dark and thought about a man who had named a company after a cistern.

He pressed 1. Then 9. Then 3. Then 1.

The red light went green. The lock clicked.

---

The office was small, and it had been the manager's.

Its window onto the pressing floor had been restored with old wavy glass, so that the millstones below seemed to tremble through it. There was a new desk in blond oak, a chair of soft leather, a laptop closed on the desk, a shelf of books about wine and sailing. On the walls, framed, more photographs: Dráganis on the deck of the *Galíni* with a minister; Dráganis at the wheel of the Stratos; Dráganis shaking hands with a man in a suit in front of a building with columns.

And in the end wall, set into the stone at waist height, the safe.

It was as big as an oven, as Lefterís had said. It was made of iron painted a dark bottle green, with gold lines round its edges, worn almost away, and on its door, in raised gold letters, the name of a firm in Liverpool and the year, 1902, and in the middle of the door, a brass dial, numbered, with a brass handle beside it.

He did not touch the laptop. He did not touch the desk. He knelt in front of the safe.

*The fourth of November, 1904. Four. Eleven. Zero, four.*

Left to four. Right, past four once, to eleven. Left to zero. Right to four.

He turned the brass handle.

It moved.

He let out his breath, slowly, and pulled the door, and the door swung open on its hinges with a long, low, grinding groan of old iron that he felt in his teeth, and inside, under the red light of the torch, there were three shelves.

On the bottom shelf there was money: bundles of euros in paper bands, a great many of them. He did not touch it. On the top shelf there was a pistol, small and black, in a holster, and a box of cartridges. He did not touch them. On the middle shelf, side by side, there were two things.

The first was a folder, green leather, with a gold clasp. He opened it on the floor of the office, kneeling, with the torch in his teeth. Bank letters. Statements. In English and Greek. A bank in Limassol. *Stérna Holdings Ltd. Account holder. Authorized signatory: F. Dráganis.* A transfer in, the fifteenth of January: four million and fifty thousand euros, from a bank in Ermoupoli, from an account in the name of Ioánnis Kalogerópoulos. Transfers out, through the spring and summer: to a shipyard in Italy, for the *Galíni*'s refit; to an auction house in Monaco; to a car dealer in Munich. There were twenty-two pages. He photographed every one of them, twice, with the small camera from his shirt pocket, flat, in the red light, and put them back in the folder in the same order, and closed the clasp, and put the folder back on the shelf exactly where it had been, a finger's width from the left wall.

The second thing was the book.

It was big. The width of his two hands spread, and longer, and heavy, bound in dark blue cloth gone gray at the corners and rubbed pale along the spine, with a cracked leather label on the front in faded gold. He lifted it out of the safe in both hands, laid it on the floor and opened it, very gently, at the first page.

The paper was thick and creamy, ruled in faint blue lines, and heading the first page, in a hand that sloped and looped and had been taught by someone who believed in beautiful letters, there was a date. *1895.* And under it a heading he could not read, and under that a list. Names. Hours. The plane tree. The fish. The second step. The fourth step. And a line, near the bottom, in the same hand, with nothing written beside it at all. A gap.

He turned the pages. Slowly at first, then faster. The hands changed. A second hand took over in the 1920s, squarer and more careful, a man who pressed hard with the pen. A third, rounder and slower, came in the 1950s. A fourth began in 1985, cramped and quick and full of crossings-out, a hand that the son would later say, holding the book in a kitchen, looked exactly like an old man's face. Every page was a week. Every week was a Sunday. Every Sunday was a list of names and hours, and every list ended with the same gap. Page after page after page. Through 1922 — he stopped there, and saw, below the gap, in the margin, in the first hand, a note of four lines, and among the four lines, a name: *Kouri.* Through 1931. He went to 1931, page by page, May, June, the whole of the summer. The same families. The same hours. The same gap. No merchant from Syros. No sale. No one.

Through the war years, when the pages were thinner and the ink was paler and some weeks had nothing written in them but a single word, which he guessed was *dry*. Through the sixties, the seventies, the eighties. To the last written page. February, this year. The fourth hand, cramped and quick. The hours of a Sunday in winter. The gap. And under it, in the same hand, in pencil, very small, two words, which he would later learn meant *To the office.*

He closed the book.

He sat back on his heels on the floor of the manager's office of the old olive press, in the dark, with the book on his knees, and the safe open in front of him, and for a moment he did not do anything at all.

Then he closed the safe. He spun the dial, twice, the way it had been. He went out of the office, and the door clicked shut behind him, and the light on the keypad went from green to red.

---

He did not go back to the boatyard.

He went along the shore in the dark with the book wrapped in a square of oilcloth inside his shirt, against his skin, and up the dry stream bed under the plane trees, past the mills, one after another, roofless and silent, and up the old mule path between the terrace walls, past the dovecotes with the pigeons asleep on their ledges, past the dead tomatoes and the brown vines and the fig trees that had found something under the stones to keep them green, up and up, in the starlight, toward the village.

It was a quarter past two in the morning when he came up the last steep narrow stair to the top of Kryovrýsi, between the whitewashed walls, and saw that the green door at the top of it was standing open, and that a lamp was burning inside.

Kyría Elpída Vasilákou was sitting at her table by the window, in her black dress and her white scarf, with her embroidery hoop in front of her and the needle in her fingers and a red thread hanging from it. She was not sewing. She was waiting.

She looked up when his shadow came into the doorway. She did not seem surprised. She looked at him for a moment with her bright eyes, and then at the shape under his shirt.

He took out the book, and unwrapped it from the oilcloth, and set it on her table, in the lamplight, among the spools of thread.

She looked at it. She put out one small, dry, brown hand and laid her fingertips on the blue cloth of the cover, very lightly, the way you would touch the forehead of a child to see whether it was warm.

Then she got up. She went to the painted chest at the end of the bed, the blue one with the red flowers on its lid, and lifted the lid, and took out, one after another, the folded cloths inside it: sheets, pillowcases, long towels with their ends worked in thread, a whole life's dowry of linen, laid down layer on layer in 1950 for a house that had never needed it. She set them on the bed in a pile. Then she came back, and took the book in both arms, though it was nearly half her size, and carried it to the chest, and laid it in the bottom, and put the linen back over it, one cloth at a time, smoothing each one flat with her palm, until the chest was full again. And she closed the lid.

She came back to the table, and sat down, and picked up the needle, and looked at him.

She said one word.

He did not know it. He found out later, from Pópi, when he asked, as casually as he could, what it meant.

It meant *Go.* But the kind of *go*, Pópi said, that you said to someone you would be seeing again: not *go away*, but *go on.*

Under the Plane Trees

For anyone who asks.

*The leader of a rally starts last. On the final stage you go out ahead of the man you are chasing, and you drive the road alone, and you finish, and then you stand at the top and wait for his time. You cannot see him. You cannot do anything about him. You have already done everything you will ever do. Someone once asked me what I feel in those minutes at the top. I said: nothing useful. That is not quite true. I feel the road I have just driven, all of it at once, every corner, the way you feel a song in your body after the music stops.*

---

At seven on Sunday morning, a man in a gray suit went up the coast road to the old olive press in a hurry, on foot, and was let in at the gate by the guard, and went in at the steel doors; and five minutes later, the launch from the *Galíni* came in fast across the bay, too fast, throwing up a white wake that set every caique in the harbor rocking at its mooring, and did not come to the mole, but ran up onto the beach below the press, and two men jumped out of it and went up the shingle at a run.

The son saw it from the terrace under the house in Kryovrýsi, with a cup of coffee in his hand, because he had not slept and had come out to watch the sun come up on the valley. He saw the launch on the beach. He saw the two men going up the shingle, one tall in a blue shirt, one heavy with a shaved head. He saw them go in at the steel doors.

He went inside and woke Stav.

They were on the stair below the shop, ten minutes later, when the gray car came up the valley road from the coast, the rented sedan from the recce, very fast, and stopped in the narrow street by the kafeneío at the top of the village, and the heavy man with the shaved head got out of it and walked down the stair past them without looking at them, to the house where Spýros Lambrou lived, and knocked on the door, and when Spýros's daughter-in-law opened it, went in past her.

He was inside for six minutes. Pópi, who had come out of her shop in her apron, counted them on the clock in her window. They heard nothing. No shouting. Nothing breaking. When the man came out again he had nothing in his hands, and he walked back up the stair past them, past Pópi in her doorway, past the old men who had come out of the kafeneío to stand in the street with their coffee cups, and got into the gray car, and drove away down the valley toward the harbor.

Pópi went down to the house at once. She came back up in five minutes.

"He looked in every room," she said. "In the cupboards. Under the bed. In the chest. In the oven. He said nothing, Katína says. Not one word. He looked at every book on the shelf. Then he went." She wiped her hands on her apron, slowly, though they were not wet. "Spýros was not there. Spýros went up to the Mána at six, like every day, to sit in his chair."

"What was he looking for?" said Stav.

Pópi looked at the son. The son looked at the valley.

"Something that isn't there," said the son.

---

The final morning was hot and still, the sea flat as a plate. At nine o'clock the Escort went out of the service park on the harbor apron on fresh tires for gravel, with the dust of Saturday washed off it and the olive-leaf green clean and shining, and Barba Lefterís standing at the barrier with his arms folded and his pencil behind his ear.

The *Pezoúles* again, first. Down through the terraces and the dovecotes and the mills.

Eight took a second and four tenths out of the Stratos on it.

Iríni read the split times off the laptop at the stop control at the bottom of the valley, among the plane trees, with the eleven mills standing roofless in a row along the dry stream behind her, and wrote them on her card, and did not smile.

"Point seven," she said. "He drove like a man with something in his shoe."

"He's lost something."

"So I hear." She closed the notebook. "Kósmas went through the warden's house this morning. All of it. Pópi says he looked in the oven." She glanced at Eight sideways. "There is nothing in the warden's house."

"No."

"Good." She opened the last notebook. On its cover, in her small upright hand, it said *MÁNA*. "Tarmac. Nine kilometers four hundred. Past the fountain. Last stage." She looked at him, and for the first time since Ermoupoli her silver eyes had something in them that was not entirely flat. "Point seven. On this road, with these hairpins, in this heat. It is possible. It is not easy."

"Nothing about this road is easy."

"No." She turned to the first page. "That is why it is a good road."

---

They changed to tarmac tires at the harbor, at noon, under the canvas sheet in front of the boatyard, in eleven minutes, with Lefterís and Chrysa and the other Kóstas from the garage, Pópi's silent husband, working on the four wheels at once with a speed that would not have disgraced a team in a championship; and the whole island stood at the barriers and watched them do it, and when the last wheel nut was torqued and the car came down off the jacks onto its new tires, the island cheered, as if that, too, were a race.

At a quarter to one, the Escort came to the start line of the *Mána*, at the foot of the valley, beside the dry stream, under the first plane trees, with the harbor behind it and the boats in their colors lying still on the flat water.

The leader would start last. The Stratos would follow them, one minute behind, on the same road. They would not see it.

Eight sat in the car on the line with his hands on the wheel and the engine running, and looked up the valley.

It went up in front of him, step on step, all the way to the sky. On every wall, on every terrace, from the bottom of the valley to the top, the island sat and waited. Three hundred people and more, in the white noon light. Children with flags. Old men with sticks. Women under black umbrellas against the sun. The schoolteacher on a wall at the fifth hairpin with seven small children in a row beside him, all of them holding up a sheet of cardboard with something drawn on it that Eight could not read from here. Pópi and her husband and Kóstas and Stav and the son, on the wall of the Margarítis terrace under the fig tree, with Stav's phone held up for a grandmother awake before dawn in Chicago. And at the top, under the plane trees, at the fountain, a single plastic chair, and in it, very small, a man in a flat cap with a stick across his knees.

"*Start,*" said Iríni, in his helmet. "*Fifty. Right three, over bridge, narrow.*"

The marshal's fingers. Five. Four. Three. Two. One.

---

He went.

The rear tires bit into the warm tarmac and screamed and caught and the Escort went off the line as if it had been fired, the engine going up into its hard tearing metallic howl, and the plane trees went past on the left, a blur of gray and cream trunks, and the dry stream bed, and the bridge.

"*Right three, over bridge.*"

Over the bridge. The car went light over the hump of it and landed, and the tail twitched, and he held it.

"*Eighty. Left two, keep in, wall outside.*"

The wall outside went past his right shoulder so close the mirror on that side folded flat against the door with a crack, and he did not notice.

"*Thirty, into hairpin right, around stone. Oil.*"

The tractor man's oil. He saw it, a dark sheen across the apex, and he braked early and hard and the nose went down and the tires shrieked and he turned in wide, around the oil, and let the tail come round on the clean tarmac, and the car pivoted on its nose round the stone corner of the terrace with its rear wheels smoking, and the smoke went up into the white light, and he was out and climbing.

"*Hairpin left. Long. Opens.*"

He could not hear the crowd. He could see it at the edges of his eyes, arms in the air, the sheet of cardboard at the fifth hairpin, but there was nothing anywhere but the engine, and the shriek of the tires, and the walls throwing the car's own noise back into his helmet doubled, and Iríni's voice, flat and even, a little ahead of the car.

"*Right four, over crest, don't cut, ditch.*"

He did not cut.

Hairpin after hairpin. Brake, late. Turn. Let the tail come. The car pivoting round its own nose, the stone corner of the terrace past the window. Throttle, the rear tires smoking and biting, and up the short straight to the next. The harbor fell away below and the sea opened out beyond it, and he did not see the sea. He did not see anything but the next corner and the one after it, coming at him out of the white light as fast as Iríni could name them.

The ninth hairpin. The tenth. The eleventh. Out under the village wall. The stair to the house under the third terrace went past on the left, the shop, the kafeneío, the faces at the windows a blur.

"*Plane trees. Dark. Light changes. Fountain left. Fence left.*"

And then, in the middle of the sentence, in the same flat even voice, something she had not said on the recce, which she had written that first morning in pencil without his seeing it:

"*Slow the eye. Not the car.*"

He went into the green tunnel of the plane trees at a hundred and ten.

The light changed. It went in an instant from the white glare of the open hillside to a deep, moving, underwater green, so dark after the glare that for a fraction of a second he was blind, and he did what she had told him: he did not lift. He kept his foot where it was and let his eyes slow down, let them open, let the dark come in, and the road came back to him out of the green, gray, curving left, and on the left the fence went by, the galvanized mesh, the gate, the sign, and behind the fence the white marble of the fountain, gold and gray, the four dry mouths, the lion and the ram and the lion and the ram, and the birds, and the tree, and the fish — and, outside the fence, under the great trunk of the plane tree, in his plastic chair, an old man in a flat cap, lifting one hand from his stick as the car went by.

Eight lifted one hand from the wheel.

Then they were out of the green and into the white again and climbing onto the bare open shoulder of the island, into the thyme and the rock, and the road ran fast and curving along the ridge to the summit, and the engine screamed, and the cairn of whitewashed stones came up at them, and the finish beam.

*Six minutes, eleven seconds, eight tenths.*

---

They stood at the summit by the cairn with their helmets off, in the stillness and the heat, and waited.

Dimítra Kanáki was already there, a minute ahead of them on the road and a minute ahead at the summit, standing beside the white BMW at the stop control. She looked at the board on the laptop, and looked at Eight, and grinned, and came over and stood beside him without saying anything, and waited too.

The Stratos was on the road.

They could hear it. All three of them, and the marshals at the stop control, and the timekeeper at his laptop, and the spectators on the bare hillside around the summit, all of them turned their heads at once and listened. The sound came up the valley from below, out of sight, a high wild ringing scream, six cylinders, howling off the terrace walls and echoing back and forth across the slope, rising at every straight and breaking at every hairpin into a shriek of tires and then rising again.

"First split," said the timekeeper, reading the laptop. "Three kilometers. He is up. Point four."

Iríni said nothing.

"Second split. Six kilometers. Under the village." The timekeeper's voice changed. "Point nine. He is up point nine."

Dimítra looked at Eight. He was looking down the valley, at the place where the green tunnel of the plane trees began, under the village. His face did nothing at all.

The scream came up under the village wall, along it, past the kafeneío, louder, nearer, howling off every house, and the son, on the wall of the Margarítis terrace under the fig tree, three hundred meters below the summit, would say afterward that it was the loudest thing he had ever heard in his life, louder than the harbor on Friday night, louder than anything, as if the car were tearing the sky in half —

And it went into the green.

There was no sound for a moment.

And then there was a sound the son would never forget either: a long, rising, terrible shriek of tires, much too long, going on and on, and under it the engine note going wild, racing, the revs flaring up into nothing, as a car's revs do when its wheels have left the road; and then a crash, a single heavy flat crash, stone and metal, that came up the valley and off the hill and rolled away across the bay; and then another, smaller; and then the engine, still screaming, alone, in the trees; and then the engine stopped.

On the summit, nobody moved.

On the walls along the valley, the whole island stood up.

---

It had gone in at a hundred and twenty and lifted.

That was what the marshal under the plane trees said, afterward, to the officials, and what the man with the camera on the mill wall would show on his little screen that evening to anyone who asked. It had come out of the white glare into the green dark at a hundred and twenty, and the driver, blinded for an instant, had done what nearly everyone does: he had lifted off the throttle, sharply, without meaning to. And the Stratos, a short car with its engine behind the driver and nearly all its weight at the back, a car that had always been beautiful and always been treacherous and always, in the end, been honest about it, did what such cars do when the throttle is lifted suddenly in a fast bend. It swapped ends. It went from pointing up the road to pointing down it in less time than it took to see it happen, and went backward off the outside of the bend, past the end of the fence, and over the lip of the first terrace below the fountain, and down onto it, onto its roof, among the dead tomato stakes, and slid, upside down, ten meters along the cracked pale earth of the Vasilákis terrace, with the stakes snapping under it like matches, until it stopped against the next wall, with its wheels in the air, still turning.

Dráganis was not hurt, and nor was Petrákis beside him. The cage held. The marshals had them both out through the side windows in a minute and a half, Petrákis first, and then Dráganis, on his hands and knees on the dead earth among the snapped tomato stakes and the white dust, in the white overalls with the stitched name. He knelt there on the Vasilákis terrace, on the first hour of the Sunday water, and pulled off his helmet, and shook his head, and looked up.

All along the walls above and below him, all the way up the valley and all the way down, the people of Askýra were standing, looking at him.

Nobody said anything. Nobody moved toward him. Nobody laughed, either; the son would remember that, afterward, and be proud of it. They simply stood, in the white noon light, on their walls, on their terraces, three hundred of them, in silence, and looked at the man kneeling in the dust of the first terrace under their spring.

At the fountain, under the plane tree, Spýros Lambrou sat in his plastic chair with his stick across his knees, and did not get up.

---

The Escort won the Askyra Springs Historic Rally by four and a half seconds from the white BMW of Dimítra Kanáki of Thessaloníki, who was the first to shake the hand of the driver whose name was not on the board, at the summit, by the cairn, before anyone else could reach him; and the Mini from Thessaloníki finished, for the first time in thirty years, eleventh, and its driver wept on the roof of it.

At the podium on the harbor at four, Eight stayed on the top step just long enough for the photographer from Athens to take one picture, with his cap pulled down, beside a small woman in a red jacket who had turned her face away from the camera; and then he took the cup from the official, a silver cup with blue ribbons and the company's drop of water engraved on its side, and stepped down off the podium, and walked across the harbor apron to the boatyard, through the crowd, which parted for him, and gave the cup to Barba Lefterís Gavalás.

The old man looked at it in his hands.

Eight said something to him, low, that nobody else heard. The old man listened. Then he nodded, and turned, and walked down the slipway with the cup to where the bare pale ribs of the new boat stood on their keel, and set it down there, inside the frames, on the keel itself, in the middle of the boat that was not yet a boat, where the light came through the ribs onto the silver; and he left it there.

That night, at eleven, in his room over the stores, Eight took the small camera out of his shirt pocket and sent forty-four photographs of twenty-two pages, twice. Once to an address in Ermoupoli, at the office of the public prosecutor, with no message. And once to a telephone number with a country code he did not recognize, beside which, in a message from Nicosia, someone had written a single word.

Then he turned off the light, and lay down on the narrow bed, and listened to the harbor, where somebody, somewhere along the front, very late, was playing a violin.

The First Stone

Kept private.

*Last night I sent forty-four photographs to a number that does not ring back. I told my son on the roof that what happens after is between that man and the people he stole from, and that is true. It is also true that I chose the hour I sent them, and the order, and that I sent them to the prosecutor first by eleven minutes, so that the law would have its chance before anyone else did. I do not know what those eleven minutes are worth. I know I will not ask. A man who sends something like that and then asks what became of it is asking to be told he was right. I am not owed that.*

---

On Monday the six o'clock boat to Syros carried more people on its upper deck than it had carried in a year.

Kyría Elpída Vasilákou came down the stair from the top of the village at five, in the dark, carried in a kitchen chair between her nephew from Piraeus and Andréas Rousákis, with Pópi going ahead with a torch and the whole of the village, it seemed, standing in their doorways in their nightclothes to watch her pass. She sat in the chair upright and furious and said, at every turn of the stair, that she had walked up and down it for ninety-one years and could do it again if anyone would let her. Nobody let her. On her lap, held in both arms against her black cardigan, wrapped in a square of red-and-blue embroidered linen, was a heavy rectangular shape that she would not allow anyone else to carry.

The cloth came behind her, rolled round a broom handle, in the arms of the schoolteacher.

Spýros Lambrou came in his jacket and his cap, with his stick, and his receipt from February, folded small, in his breast pocket.

Kóstas Margarítis came with the postcard, in a clear plastic sleeve, inside a book, inside his shirt.

The son came with the certified extract from page 4,416 of the notarial register of Ioánnis Mamoúnas, in an envelope, and his notebook, and the recorder, though he did not think he would use it.

Iríni came because, she said, somebody had to know which floor the court was on.

They sat together on the benches in the wind, and the island went down behind them into the sea in the first gray light, the stepped valley, the white village, the dry line of the plane trees, the gray square of concrete at the head of it all. Kyría Elpída did not look back at it. She sat on the bench with her parcel in her arms and her eyes shut and her chin up, and the son, beside her, thought she might be asleep, until halfway across she said something without opening her eyes, and Pópi laughed.

"She says she has not been to Syros since 1974," Pópi said. "She says it was full of thieves then too."

---

The lawyer was waiting for them on the quay at Ermoupoli.

She was perhaps forty, in a dark suit, with a briefcase in each hand and the face of a woman who had not slept much: Ariádni, the sister of the young man with the beard in the archives. Her brother had called her on Saturday night, after a woman in a red jacket called him, and she had spent Sunday in her office with the windows shut, writing.

"Forty-one pages," she said, on the quay, in English, for the son. "An action for the correction of an inaccurate first registration in the national land register. On behalf of the community of Kryovrýsi, and twenty-three named families, and the heirs of one widow from Smyrna whom I have not yet been able to find. Against Askyra Springs S.A. and Ioánnis Kalogerópoulos." She lifted one briefcase an inch. "It needs one thing more. It needs the book."

Kyría Elpída, in her chair on the quay, where her nephew and Andréas had set her down, opened her eyes and held out the parcel.

The lawyer knelt on the marble in her suit, among the fish crates and the cats, and unwrapped the linen, and opened the blue cover, and turned to 1931, and read for some time. The son knew the look when it came, from thirty-one kitchens: the moment a person stops reading a document and starts reading people.

"Yes," the lawyer said finally, very quietly. "Yes. This is it."

She closed the book and stood up.

"The court opens at eight," she said. "We will be at the door."

---

They were inside it by ten past eight, in a high cool room with a marble floor and tall windows and long wooden benches like a schoolroom's, and a counter where two clerks sat with stamps and stacks of files under a clock.

It took four hours.

The son would remember those hours as a single long stillness full of small sounds. The lawyer at the counter, laying papers down one by one. The stamp. Spýros called to the counter, unfolding his receipt from February and smoothing it flat on the wood, and the clerk looking up at the old man, and stamping it. The cloth unrolled across three benches under the tall windows, with two clerks from another office bending over it, not touching. Kóstas with the postcard in its sleeve, saying something in his old coat of Greek that made the clerk smile. Page 4,416, the copper pan and the sewing treadle, and the clerk reading it twice and putting her hand over her mouth.

And at the end of four hours, at a quarter past twelve, by the clock on the wall, a sheet of paper with a number on it, and three stamps, and a signature, which the lawyer held up for them to see from the counter, and then carried across the marble floor and put into Kyría Elpída's hands.

"It is filed," she said. "Today. Nine days before the end. The action is registered. The register will carry a note against the parcel: that its ownership is in dispute, before the court. Anyone who buys it, or lends against it, buys a lawsuit." She looked at the old woman. "Courts are slow. But the court will look at a book from 1895 and a copy of a copy from 2023, and I do not think it will need to think for long."

Kyría Elpída looked at the paper in her hands. She could not read it without her ship's-window glasses, and she had left them on her table at the top of the village. She did not ask for them. She folded it in half, and in half again, and tucked it into the front of her black cardigan, against her chest, and folded her hands over it.

Then she said something to the lawyer.

Pópi translated.

"She says, thank you, my girl. She says now take me somewhere I can have a coffee, because I have been sitting in a courthouse for four hours with thieves' furniture, and I am ninety-one."

---

They were in a café on the great marble square, under the arcades, at one o'clock, with coffee and a plate of the powdered sweets, when the news came.

It came to the lawyer's phone first, and then in a buzzing ripple round the table. The lawyer read it twice and put the phone face down.

"Vrettákos," she said. "He walked into the prosecutor's office at eleven. By himself. With his own lawyer. And a box of papers." She picked up her coffee cup and put it down again without drinking. "They say he has been talking for two hours."

Nobody said anything.

"And this," said Iríni. She turned her own phone round on the table so that the others could see the screen. It was a news site, in Greek and in English. A short paragraph. A photograph of the big white boat in a harbor. *Galáni Blue Partners announces the immediate suspension of all activity relating to the Askyra Springs project, pending an internal review of certain transactions. The partners have appointed independent counsel. Mr. Fílippos Dráganis has stepped down as managing partner with immediate effect.*

"Stepped down," said Kóstas. "That was fast."

"Yes," said Iríni. She turned the phone back and looked at it a little longer. "Very fast." She put the phone away and ate a powdered sweet, and dusted the sugar off her fingers, and said nothing else at all.

---

Fílippos Dráganis was seen once more that day.

A clerk at the small airport in the dry valley behind Ermoupoli saw him at six in the evening, though she did not know at the time who he was: a tall man in a blue linen shirt, with silver hair and sunglasses, standing on the apron beside a small white jet that had landed twenty minutes before, talking to two men who had come off it. They were not in uniform. They did not carry bags. One of them had his hand on the tall man's shoulder, lightly, the way you might guide a friend through a door. The clerk noticed only that the tall man was not smiling, and that he took off his sunglasses once, and looked at the sea, and put them back on.

The jet left at a quarter to seven. It filed a plan for an airport in another country. It did not land there. Where it landed, the clerk did not know, and nobody ever asked her.

The *Galíni* was found on Wednesday morning at anchor in a bay on the north coast of Syros, with her crew ashore in Ermoupoli, on leave, they said, by the owner's order of Monday afternoon, and nobody aboard at all.

The Stratos stayed on its roof on the Vasilákis terrace for nine days, because no one from the company came for it and nobody on the island would touch it. The teacher took the seven children down to look at it after school, and told them it was a lesson about light, and about lifting your foot when you should not, and they all nodded very seriously.

---

The pump stopped on Tuesday at a quarter past eleven in the morning.

Inside the concrete block there was only the young man in the blue T-shirt who switched it off, the one who had carried the lilies down Kyría Elpída's stair. His name was Fánis, and he was Andréas Rousákis's sister's son, and he had taken the job at the bottling plant because there were no others. He read the letter from the company's new counsel twice, pressed a red button, and walked out and sat down on the ground against the fence post.

The hum stopped.

Spýros Lambrou, in his plastic chair under the plane tree on the other side of the fence, heard it stop. The son was told afterward that the old man did not move for a full minute. Then he stood up, with his stick, and went over to the young man sitting on the ground against the fence post, and held out his hand, and the young man took it, and stood up, and unlocked the gate.

They took down the fence that afternoon, the whole village, with their hands and a pair of bolt cutters from Pópi's husband's garage, post by post, panel by panel, and stacked the steel mesh against the cliff, neatly, because, as Pópi said, steel was steel and somebody would want it for goats.

And then they waited.

It took two hours. The hill had been pumped at the source for five months and had to fill again. The whole of Kryovrýsi sat on the walls around the little square under the plane tree, and nobody went home. Michális Rousákis came down the stair from behind the kafeneío with the black violin in its case under his arm, very slowly, leaning on his nephew, and sat on the lip of the dry trough, and Stav sat beside him with his own violin, and they did not play. They waited too.

At twenty past five, the lion on the left coughed.

It was a small sound. A gurgle, deep inside the marble, and a breath of cool air out of the stone mouth, and a single drop, which hung on the lion's lip, and swelled, and fell into the dust of the dry trough and made a small dark star.

Then the ram coughed.

Then, all at once, all four of them, the lion and the ram and the lion and the ram, choking and spitting and gasping, air and water together, in bursts — and then not bursts. Water. Four ropes of it, clear and bright and cold, pouring out of the four stone mouths into the marble trough, drumming on the dust, washing the dead wasp and the curled leaves and the pale skin of five months to the end of the trough and over the lip, rising, filling, running.

Nobody cheered, not at first. They stood up on their walls, and the sound of the water filled the little square, the sound every one of them had heard every day of their lives until April, and they listened to it. Some of the old women had their hands over their mouths. Kyría Elpída, in her kitchen chair at the front, carried down the stair for the second time in two days, had her eyes shut.

Spýros Lambrou walked to the head of the big channel, where it left the trough and ran along the foot of the village wall toward the terraces, and bent, with one hand on his stick, and took hold of the flat stone that stood upright in its groove there, and lifted it.

The water went into the channel.

Michális Rousákis stood up off the lip of the trough, tall and gaunt in his white vest, with his white hair standing up, and put the black violin under his chin, and took the bow in his ruined hand, and played.

The bright running tune. Round, and round again. Rough and slow and dark, every note given its weight. Andréas was there with the laouto by the second bar, chopping time. And the village began to move: first the old women, then the children, then everyone, joining hands in a line along the channel, the *syrtós*, the line of women holding hands that Kyría Elpída had stitched on her cloth in 1948, stepping and turning and stepping, following the water as it went down the channel along the foot of the village wall, toward the first terrace, the Vasilákis terrace, where the first hour began.

And where the turn came, the old man lowered his bow, and looked at the boy.

Stav played the turn.

He played it the way the old man had told him to. Not like a schoolboy. Not like a thing written down. He played it like a man standing at the head of a valley, looking up, to see whether the water was coming, and it has not come yet, and he is afraid it will not, and he asks, once, and then again, louder — and then he sees it. And the turn fell back into the bright running tune, and the old man took it, and the line of dancers went on down along the channel beside the running water in the evening light, under the plane trees, toward the terraces, singing now, some of them, the old ones, words the son did not know and did not try to record.

He stood by the fountain with the recorder in his pocket and did not take it out.

Beside him, Pópi Lambrou had her phone in her hand. She was crying, openly, and did not seem to notice. She was looking at the screen. She pressed something on it, and then something else, and then she typed, slowly, with one finger, a single word, and pressed again.

The son saw what it was. He had helped set it up, from a terrace, on a Sunday, for a woman in a bakery on South Halsted Street. *For when the water comes down the channel again. Pópi will know.*

Pópi put the phone away.

When the tune ended, and the line of dancers had reached the Vasilákis terrace and broken up, laughing, wet to the ankles where the water had gone into the first channel and over the stones, Stav's phone, in the pocket of his jeans, made a small sound.

He took it out. He looked at it. The son saw his face change.

He walked away from everyone, along the channel, a little way, to a place where the terrace wall made a corner and a fig tree hung over it, and sat down on the wall with his back to the village and the violin across his knees and the phone in his hand, and listened to something, with the phone held close to his ear, for some time.

Nobody went to him. Michális Rousákis, on the lip of the full trough, looked along the channel at the boy's back and said something quietly to his nephew, which Andréas told the son afterward.

"He said: her grandmother. He said: let him be."

---

That night, very late, the son sat on the terrace under the house with his notebook, in the dark, and listened.

The channel along the foot of the wall above the terrace was running. It made a small, steady, endless sound, a hand's width wide and a hand's width deep, like a voice talking quietly to itself in another room. In the morning, Spýros would lift the stone at the Vasilákis terrace and drop it again, at the hour, and the water would go on to the next family. Next Sunday the hours would start again, the plane tree and the fish and the bell that did not ring and the second step and the fourth step. And then the gap.

Stav came out of the house and sat on the wall beside him. He had his phone in his hand. He did not say anything at first.

"She told me about Pappoús," he said at last. "In the message. About the night before they left, in 1963. About him playing at the Mána. The water tune. And about the *xenitiá*. She said it's a place you live in and you never stop living in it, even if you go home. She said now I'm in it too, because I've been here." He turned the phone over in his hands. "And she said, now you know where the water is. Don't forget. That was the last thing. *Now you know where the water is.*"

The son wrote nothing down.

After a while Stav got up and went inside. The son sat on alone, on the terrace wall, with the water running in the dark beside him, and did not write it down at all.

The Passer-by's Hour

For anyone who asks.

*On the morning we left the island it rained for the first time since April. Not much. A gray curtain came over the sea from the northwest, and went across the terraces for twenty minutes, and moved on toward Tinos. People came out of their houses to stand in it. An old woman stood in her doorway with her face turned up and her eyes closed. A man I had seen beating an octopus on the rocks every evening for three weeks put down his octopus and opened his arms. I have stood in a great deal of rain in my life, in a great many countries, and been annoyed by most of it. I am told I am expected home before the rain. I think, this once, I will be forgiven.*

---

The panigýri was on the last Saturday, under the plane tree, at the Mána, and it began, as Pópi said every panigýri on Askýra had always begun, with an argument about the goats.

There were four of them. They had been cooking since four in the morning in two enormous blackened pots over wood fires on the paving in front of the fountain, with rice and onions and tomatoes from the high terraces and a great deal of wine and a sprig of something from the hillside that each of the four men tending the pots claimed was the secret and the other three claimed was a weed. By noon the smell of it had gone down the whole valley to the harbor and up the whole valley to the summit and the argument had been going on for eight hours and was, by general agreement, the best part.

They set the tables along the channel. That was Kyría Elpída's idea, delivered from her kitchen chair at the head of the square in a single sentence. Long trestle tables, end to end, borrowed from every house in the village, running from the fountain along the foot of the village wall beside the big channel, all the way to the Vasilákis terrace, so that everyone who sat at them sat beside the water, and could put a hand down and touch it, and the children could float fig leaves along it from one end of the feast to the other and race them.

There was wine from every barrel on the island, and bread rings from the village oven, and a peppery fermented cheese that Kóstas Margarítis tasted and said was his grandmother's and could not speak again for a while. There was fáva, and octopus, and figs. There was moustalevriá, dark amber, trembling, in a dozen bowls, from the vines Kyría Elpída's nephew had kept alive all summer with a can, scattered with sesame and walnuts and cinnamon. There was the goat and the rice, ladled out of the black pots onto every plate in steaming heaps by the four arguing men, who went on arguing while they served.

And there was music, from noon until the stars came out.

Andréas on the laouto. Michális Rousákis on the black violin, sitting on the lip of the full trough with the water pouring out of the four stone mouths beside him and his ruined hands doing what they had not done in four years, because, he said, the water made them warm. Stav beside him, on the other violin, who knew eleven island tunes now and played every one of them at least six times and was told after each one that he played like a schoolboy, and was told it, the son noticed, more and more fondly. And a young man nobody had expected: the bouzouki player from the company's dinner, who had stayed on when the others went home because he had heard an old man play a violin on a terrace one night and wanted to know what it was, and who listened for three hours with his bouzouki silent on his knee before he dared to play a note.

The tablet stood in its case on the table in front of Kyría Elpída, and on it, in her kitchen above the bakery on South Halsted Street, at seven in the morning Chicago time, with the ovens going behind her and Maureen at her shoulder, was Fotiní Margaríti, in her best cardigan, watching.

She did not say much. She watched the whole thing, for six hours. Every now and then she said something in Greek to Kyría Elpída, and Kyría Elpída said something back, and both of them laughed, two old women, one at the top of a valley in the Aegean and one in a city on a lake on the other side of the world, laughing at something nobody else at the table could follow. And once, late in the afternoon, when her son got up from the table beside the water and joined the line of dancers going round in the *syrtós*, big and heavy and clumsy in his short-sleeved shirt, with Pópi holding one of his hands and Spýros Lambrou, astonishingly, the other, Fotiní put her hand over her mouth and kept it there until the dance was over.

---

Eight came late, and sat at the end of the table, at the Vasilákis terrace end, among the fishermen.

The island had decided, over the last six days, without a meeting, what it would and would not say to him. It would not say thank you. It would not ask him anything. It would give him a plate of goat and rice and a glass of wine and a seat beside the water, and talk to him about cars and fish and the weather, and when he got up to go, it would let him go.

That was what it did. Yiórgos Mavrommátis, the fisherman, poured his wine and told him at some length about a grouper he had nearly caught in 1998. Barba Lefterís, two places down, said nothing to him at all, the whole afternoon, and once, when the music stopped, lifted his glass very slightly in his direction, and drank.

Iríni was not there. She had gone back to Athens on Wednesday on the big ferry, in her red jacket, with her notebooks in her canvas bag, without saying goodbye to anyone, and Eight had found, that evening, in the passenger footwell of the Escort, under the seat, the last notebook, the one with *MÁNA* written on the cover. On its final page, under the last pace note, in her small upright hand, she had written: *Slow the eye. Not the car. — For the next road.*

Dimítra Kanáki had gone too, with her father's BMW and its first finish, on the same ferry. Before she went she had come to the boatyard and shaken his hand and said only, "The islands talk. I will tell my grandmother on Tinos." And then: "Next year, Escort. I will be faster."

At dusk, when the lamps were lit along the tables and the stars were coming out over the valley, the son came and sat beside his father.

He had a card in his hand. A plain white card. He turned it over, and on the back of it, in the son's own small quick print, there was an address in Ermoupoli: a flat behind the market, over the phone-case shop.

"I want to send one there," the son said.

His father looked at the card.

"He signed the papers," the son said. "He took the money. He sold an island he never saw." He turned the card in his fingers. "But he told me the truth on a landing when he didn't have to. And he said to tell them he was sorry. And he said his father sold ropes." He looked at the water running past in the channel at their feet. "And nobody else is ever going to send him anything."

His father took a while to answer. He looked at the card, and at the son's face, and then out across the long table beside the water, where the whole island was eating and drinking and dancing in the lamplight under the plane tree, and the old man with the violin was playing, and the water was running.

"It's your card," he said. "You drew it."

"You don't know that. You mixed them."

"I know it's yours," said his father, "because you're the one holding it." He picked up his glass. "Send it."

---

The cards were found on Sunday morning, at first light, before the rain.

Nobody saw them put there. Nobody ever did. Spýros Lambrou found the first one at six, when he came up to the Mána with his stick to lift the first stone of the week for the Vasilákis hour, as he had done every Sunday for forty-one years until April and would do again now until he could not. It was under the stone. When he lifted it out of its groove, the card was lying in the channel bed beneath it, on the flat stones, dry, folded once: a plain white card, and on it, in black ink, one unbroken line that made two rounds and met itself in the middle.

He stood there for some time with the stone in one hand and the card in the other, and the water waiting behind the stone.

Then he put the card in his breast pocket, with the receipt from February, and lifted the stone the rest of the way, and let the water in.

There were twenty-two more under twenty-two more stones, one at the head of each family's channel, on every terrace in the valley, from the Vasilákis terrace to the Mavrommátis terrace and through the afternoon hours beyond, and the families found them one by one, through that Sunday and the next, as the water reached them at their hours: under the stone, in the dry channel bed, waiting. And at the end of the morning hours, at the fourth step, where the water went for an hour into a channel that belonged to no family at all and ran down to a long bare terrace that had been kept empty, by custom, for two hundred years, for whoever came, there was no card under the stone. Spýros looked. The son, who was there, saw him look. There was nothing under that stone but the stone.

There were others. In the wheelhouse of the caique *Fotiní*, tucked into the frame of the compass. In the black violin's case, behind the kafeneío, between the strings and the bridge, so that Michális Rousákis found it when he went to play and sat down on his bed and did not play for a while. In the school register, in the teacher's desk, between the pages for this week and next. On the scales in Pópi's shop, under the weight. In Chrysa's tin of green paint, taped to the inside of the lid. In Kyría Elpída's hoop, under the linen, so that when she sat down at her table and picked up her needle she found a single line in black ink showing through the white square she was working on, two loops, crossing; and she put down the needle and looked at it, and then picked it up again and, very slowly, in red thread, began to stitch over the line, following it exactly, round and across and round and back, so that it would be there long after the ink had faded.

And on the keel of the new boat in the boatyard, inside the pale ribs, beside the silver cup with its blue ribbons, there was one more, held down against the wind by a single smooth stone from the beach.

Barba Lefterís Gavalás found it there on Sunday morning when he came down to sit on his crate. He did not pick it up. He left it where it was, under its stone, beside the cup, on the keel, and that week he began to plank the boat, and he planked over it, so that it is in there still, between the keel and the first strake, where nobody will ever see it, inside a boat that will be painted, every three years, by his granddaughter, in colors nobody has used on Askýra before: the green of the underside of an olive leaf, with a band of blue.

Three other cards went out through the post on Monday, from the little post office at Skála, in three envelopes, each addressed in a different hand. One went to a court clerk in Ermoupoli who had put her hand over her mouth. One went to a man above a phone shop. One went, at the end of a long slow journey through two continents, in a stiff envelope with a square of cardboard behind it, to a bakery on South Halsted Street, Chicago, where it arrived eleven days later, a little tired, and was put, by an old woman who said nothing at all to anybody about it, into a drawer in her kitchen, beside a postcard of her spring that she had bought on a quay in Piraeus in 1963, and which had come home.

---

The rain came as the landing craft went out past the end of the mole.

It came out of the northwest in a long gray curtain, and the son, in the bow, felt the first drops on his face and turned to watch it go over Askýra: across the harbor and the painted boats and up the valley terrace by terrace, darkening the walls to brown and the cracked earth to black, all the way to the plane trees at the head of it. He could see people coming out of their doors to stand in it. On the end of the mole, the octopus man had his arms open.

His father was beside him at the rail.

"Mom's going to say you missed it," the son said. "The rain. That you always come home after it."

"I'll tell her I didn't. I'll tell her I stood in it." His father watched the island. "This once she'll forgive me."

The rain moved on toward Tinos and was gone, and the sun came out behind it on the wet island, and every terrace wall in the valley shone.

---

They came up the lane to the family house four days later, in the late afternoon, in the square truck, with the Escort in the plane in the hangar behind the hills, and the son's grandfather was standing at the mailbox with the lieutenant.

The son's father stopped the truck at the foot of the lane. He did not drive up. He got out, and left the son in the cab, and walked up the lane, slowly, on foot, in the gold light, with the dry grass moving round his boots and the surf working at the foot of the bluff, toward his father.

The son watched from the truck.

He saw the two men stop, a meter apart. He saw his grandfather look at his father's face, carefully, the way he read a difficult clue. He saw him lift the hand that was not on the lieutenant, and put it, briefly, on his son's arm, above the elbow, and take it away.

He could not hear what they said. He asked, later, at dinner, and his grandfather said, "I asked him whether they kept the hour."

"And what did he say?"

"He said yes." His grandfather reached for the water jug. "So I told him that someone always comes."

---

His mother planted the seeds on the first Sunday of October, on the bluff, at the edge of the field, in the poor sandy ground between the roses, where the wind came straight in off the Pacific and nothing should have grown and everything did out of contrariness. She planted them in a row, eleven of them, a finger's depth, the way Kyría Elpída had said through Pópi on a slip of paper in the bag: *they like wind, and poor soil, and to be left alone*. And she kept the little linen bag with its border of perfectly square red and blue diamonds on the windowsill in the kitchen, where the light came in, and said nothing about it to anyone, and the son saw her, sometimes, in the mornings, standing at the window with her coffee, looking at it.

The morning after they came home, the son was out on the porch steps before anyone else was up, in a sweater, with coffee and the notebook, while the fog was still lifting off the field in long torn sheets and the sea under it was the color of pewter.

He had not written anything the night before. He had been too tired, and there had been the dinner, and his grandmother's cooking, and his little cousin wanting to hear about the octopus man three times. So he wrote it now, in the cold, with the pencil stiff in his fingers: the island going under the rain, terrace by terrace; four stone mouths coughing and then running; an old man with a stick lifting a flat stone out of its groove; a boy on a wall under a fig tree with a phone against his ear; a cup on a keel inside a boat that was not yet a boat. And the weather, because some habits outlast their reasons: *Fog lifting. Wind light, northwest. Sea gray, then silver.*

Down the right-hand side of the page, where his pencil had always strayed, he left a strip of paper bare. He did it on purpose. He ruled it off with a single faint line from top to bottom, the way a girl of thirteen had once left a band of linen unworked between the colors of the families, and he wrote nothing in it, and he did not intend to. It was the width of his thumb. It was nobody's.

Behind him the screen door creaked, and his grandfather came out with the lieutenant and his own cup, and lowered himself onto the top step, slowly, one hand on the rail, and looked at the open notebook on the son's knee without asking to.

He looked at the bare strip for some while.

"Good," he said at last. "Leave it like that." He drank his coffee. "Somebody will come."

Above them, on the corner post of the porch, the old orange float turned on its nail in the first of the morning wind, its worn black number toward the sea.