Epilogue I #2
"My brother," he said to me, watching Constantine on the western perimeter, "their father, your Athan's father, he would have liked this.
He was a man who believed in stones. He read Kazantzakis.
He wept at the Parthenon once. I saw him do it.
He said, 'Petros, these stones will outlive everything we do.
' He was right. And now his son is paying for the protection of stones that are older than any stones his father protected. This is the right shape of things."
"Thank you, Uncle Petros."
"Do not thank me. I was wrong about you.
I was wrong for the first three weeks, when I told Athan that bringing an American archaeologist into the family was a disaster.
I was wrong for the next three weeks, when I told him that the pregnancy was a complication.
I have been, in general, wrong about everything since you arrived, and I am now old enough to admit it without shame.
" He took a long drink of the Mavrodaphne he had poured himself.
"Your grandmother was from Naxos. I knew a woman from Naxos once.
She sang ballads in the evening that made men weep into their glasses.
You have the same face. That is not a coincidence. "
"It is not a coincidence, no."
"Good. I have said what I came to say. Bring the palace out of the ground. I will be dead before it is finished. If there is ever a donor wall at the site museum, put me somewhere visible."
"I will name a room after you, Uncle Petros."
"Not a storage room. A good room."
"A good room."
He nodded, satisfied, and began telling a story about his brother, the brothers' father, that I had not heard before, and that I made a mental note to transcribe later because it belonged to the daughter I was carrying.
At 7 PM, we stopped work for the day. The team dispersed.
Yannis drove me and the brothers and Margot down the narrow road to the taverna at the base of the hill, the one run by a woman named Eleni who had been feeding archaeologists since 1982 and whose grilled octopus was the reason the dig had been able to retain its graduate students through the summer heat.
We sat at the long wooden table on the terrace.
The sunset was the particular Cretan sunset that painted the sky in the colors of the pottery we had been cataloging, and the bottle of retsina was cold, and the octopus was, as always, perfect.
I was sunburned. I was dusty. The baby was kicking low in my abdomen in a way that suggested an opinion about the octopus.
Margot was explaining to Athan why her categorization system for the Linear A fragments was superior to the one the Hellenic Ministry had proposed, and Athan was listening with the expression of a man who knew he was going to lose the argument but was going to require Margot to win it on the merits.
Constantine was silent, sunburned, and holding my hand under the table with the particular grip of a man who had decided that physical contact was the only communication he needed to maintain in a social setting.
Spiro would be here in two hours. Petros had gone back to Athens with a copy of the excavation report and a signed photograph of the lintel stone.
I looked at the dig in the distance, the tarpaulins glowing faintly in the last of the light, the perimeter lamps coming on, the outline of the palace I had found emerging from the earth my mother had run from.
I stood at the edge of the trench, one last time in the day, and I looked at the palace emerging from the earth, and I thought: My mother ran from this family to protect me.
I came back and found something she buried deeper than any artifact.
She buried the possibility that I could love this place, and these people, and this work, all at once.
I have unburied it. It is mine now. And it will be my daughter's.
I walked back to the taverna. The table was waiting. The retsina was still cold. The life I had built out of a trap was the life I would not have exchanged for any life I had once imagined.
Later, after the plates had been cleared and the second bottle of retsina had been half-finished, Margot raised her glass and proposed a toast. The toast was in her usual key, dry, academic, delivered with the small, crooked smile she reserved for moments she intended to mean more than her words suggested.
"To the Palace of Thalia. To the three-thousand-year-old stones.
To the impossibility of predicting which digs will matter and which will be forgotten.
And to the woman in the middle of this table, who has, through a combination of professional stubbornness and very unusual personal decisions, produced the most interesting Mediterranean archaeology story of the decade.
" She looked at me. "I am not going to tell you I approve of your choices.
I am going to tell you that I approve of what you have built out of them.
Those are different things. Drink, please. "
We drank. Athan permitted himself a small smile that I recognized as the expression he wore when he was receiving recognition that mattered to him.
Constantine did not smile, but the grip on my hand under the table tightened fractionally in the way that was his equivalent of a smile.
Yannis, at the far end of the table, raised his glass in silent acknowledgment.
The graduate students, three of whom had been permitted to join us at the taverna for reasons that had mostly to do with Margot's insistence that the team needed to bond, applauded politely.
Spiro arrived at 9:48 PM. He walked up the terrace steps in travel clothes, carrying a briefcase and a small bag that I knew contained a gift, because Spiro never returned from Athens without bringing something small and carefully chosen for me, and he paused at the top of the steps long enough to survey the table and locate the empty chair Margot had reserved for him.
He crossed the terrace. He sat down. He set the briefcase on the ground and the small bag on the table in front of me, and he kissed my temple without saying anything, because the arrival itself was the statement.
Inside the bag was a book. It was an old edition of Cavafy, not the one he already owned, which I had seen on his desk in the soundproofed room a hundred times, but a different edition, a 1935 Alexandria printing that he must have found in an antiquarian shop during his lunch break.
He had placed a small slip of paper inside the cover.
The slip of paper said, in Spiro's careful handwriting: For the mother of our child.
The poems that I did not get to read to you during the years I was too frightened to speak plainly.
I put the book in my lap and did not speak for a moment, because there was nothing to say in the presence of three men and a best friend and a security chief and three graduate students that would not have been inappropriate for the occasion.
I simply placed my hand over Spiro's on the table.
He turned his hand over beneath mine and interlaced our fingers.
The metronome that had rotated the pen for five years was still.
The stillness held. For once, it did not look temporary.