Chapter One
The Man at the End of the Lane
You asked me to describe him and I have been thinking, since your message, about where to begin. Not because there is so much to say but because the things worth saying resist the order I keep trying to put them in.
He arrived in February, when the island still belonged to us. The house at the end of the lane had been empty since the Athenian family stopped coming, and then one morning his bags were on the step and the shutters were open and that was that. He is American, or Canadian, something in between the way he tells it. He does not explain himself and I have stopped asking.
What I can tell you is this. He wakes before anyone. I know because I have seen the light in his kitchen window from my terrace while the harbor is still dark and the cats are the only ones moving. By the time the bread comes he is already on his mat in the courtyard, and I say mat but what I mean is a particular rectangle of red that he has placed with a care that suggests it has been placed the same way in many courtyards before this one. It could be a rug. He sits with one knee up. Two fingers at his lips. He is not praying and he is not sleeping. Likely yoga.
His body is covered in ink. You will notice this the first time you see him at the beach and then you will stop noticing, the way you stop noticing the tattoos on Konstantinos’s forearms after the third coffee. There is an elephant on one thigh. Some kind of mask across the belly. Script I cannot read curling over the heart. The hair has gone silver at the temples and he wears it back when he is working and loose when he is not, and the difference tells you something about the hour of the day without needing to check. He has a gold chain that catches the morning light in a way I find difficult to describe without sounding like my mother describing a saint, so I will only say it catches the light.
He works in the mornings. What the work is I am not entirely sure. He sits at the table by the window with the sea at his back and writes, or reads, or stays very still with his hands open on the table. Around eleven he closes whatever it is and washes his cup with the attention of a man who has decided that washing a cup is worth doing properly. Then he walks.
I showed him the path above the kastro in March, when the anemones were still out and the wind had not yet decided what month it was. He walked it the way people walk a place they intend to remember, not photographing, touching the wall here and there, stopping where the path bends and the whole arc of the bay opens below. He said something I did not fully hear and then was quiet for a long time. The quiet was not uncomfortable. This is the thing about him that is hardest to explain to someone who has not sat with him: he carries silence as if it has weight and value and he does not feel the need to fill it.
We have eaten together perhaps a dozen times. At Makis’s, mostly, outside when the evenings turned warm enough. He eats without hurry, asks questions about the food, about where the wine comes from, about the man two tables over who comes every Thursday. He is curious in the way that good listeners are curious, which is to say he does not ask in order to speak next. He drinks moderately, a glass or two, and nurses the second one. Once, in April, we stayed late and he laughed at something Makis said, a real laugh, sudden and unguarded, and Makis looked pleased with himself for a week.
We swam at Sifneikos in the mornings, twice, when the water was still cold enough to make it feel like a decision. He went in naked without ceremony, no standing at the edge testing with a foot. He swam out to where the color changes and floated there for a while with his face to the sky and the tattoos darkened and the gold chain somewhere under the surface. He came back without racing himself. There is something in the way he inhabits his body that I have been trying to name for two months and the closest I can get is competence, though that is not quite right either.
I will tell you the small things because I think the small things are the portrait.
He sweeps his step each morning after the mat. He buys tomatoes from Eleni’s boy and always pays more than the price. He reads outside in the afternoon shade with his feet bare on the stone and sometimes he falls asleep and the book stays open on his chest and the cats gather at a respectful distance. He has learned enough Greek to greet people correctly and to apologize correctly, which in this village is most of what you need. The woman at the bakery calls him the tall one. This is accurate.
He will leave when the summer comes, or so he has said, though he says it the way people say things they have not decided. He does not talk about where he is going. He talks about the light here in the late afternoon, the way it goes horizontal and turns the kastro walls the color of old honey. He talked about this at some length one evening and I sat there listening to a foreigner describe my own island to me and found, to my surprise, that I was seeing something I had stopped seeing.
That is the most I know how to say about him.
Come June you will see for yourself. I think you will like him. I think, more to the point, he is the kind of person whose company makes you like yourself a little better for a few hours, and on a small island in summer that is no small thing.
Letters
I. Antiparos, 14 May — Nikos to Octavio
Octavio,
You are right and I resent you for it.
I have been sitting with your question since Thursday and the honest answer is that I did not write about how he makes me feel because I was not sure I wanted to look at it directly. You know me. You have always known me better than I know myself across a distance, which is a talent I find alternately useful and insufferable.
So. Here is what you asked for.
He smells of cedar and something underneath the cedar that I cannot identify with certainty, something faintly resinous, like the inside of a chest that has been in a warm room a long time. When he has been in the sun there is salt in it. Once, after we swam, he shook the water from his hair near me and I caught something else, green and herbal, whatever he washes with. It is not a complicated smell. It is not trying to be anything. This, I realize, is true of most things about him.
How he makes me feel.
When I am with him I find myself speaking more carefully than I usually do. Not because he judges imprecise speech but because he listens to it so completely that imprecision feels wasteful. He gives the impression, sitting across a table, that what you are saying is the most considered thing he has heard all day, and this is not performance, or if it is, it is a performance so long practiced it has become indistinguishable from the real thing. I am not sure the distinction matters.
He makes me feel, Octavio, a little like the island felt before I stopped seeing it. I told you about this, the evening he described the late light on the kastro walls. That is the closest I can get. He is attentive in a way that is slightly contagious. I walked home that night and noticed the smell of the jasmine on Kyria Stavroula’s wall, which has been there my entire life.
There is also this. He moves through the narrow lanes with an awareness of his own dimensions that most men do not have. He does not crowd. He steps aside for the old women without making a ceremony of it. At Makis’s he folds himself into the small chair and there is nothing awkward in it, the body simply accommodates. I notice this because my brother manages to take up more space than anyone in any room he enters, and I have spent thirty years watching people make themselves smaller around him. With Kirin it works the other way. People seem to expand slightly.
I do not know what to do with this, practically speaking.
He brought me a bottle of wine last week, from the shop near the port, nothing expensive, wrapped in paper he had folded himself in the way you might wrap a gift for a child you liked. He left it on my step with a note that said “thank you for showing me the path“. I put the note in the kitchen drawer. I do not usually keep notes.
You asked how he makes me feel and I have given you everything I have. Make of it what you will. You are the writer.
Bring the good tobacco when you come in June.
Your cousin,
Nikos
II. — Octavio to Nikos
Nikos, you never give everything. You always save something for yourself. I’ll not fault you for that. We all have our secrets. You are more the real writer than those of us who pretend and get paid for it.
Who has this fellow taken up with. He must spend time with others. Or only you? I didn’t sense that he was a big man. But then again you are only five foot six yourself so most everyone is big to you. I digress in jest.
What do you think he wouldn’t tell you if you asked him?
June can’t come soon enough the way things are here. I wonder how I will find this fellow if I meet him. How old is he? Mirna asks what sign is he? Of course she does.
Funny how we both look forward to being away from each other each year. Not because we have become tired, bored, or otherwise focused. And there is nothing secretive. Our time is our own for June. I am glad it has become our tradition. Our way.
Octavio
III. Antiparos, 21 May — Nikos to Octavio
Octavio,
Five foot seven. I have told you this repeatedly and you continue to misremember it with a consistency that I can only read as intentional.
You ask who else. There is Makis, who has adopted him the way Makis adopts anyone who asks genuine questions about the food and tips without the arithmetic of a tourist. They have a kind of wordless transaction each evening, Makis bringing things Kirin did not order but always finishes, Kirin leaving the table in better condition than he found it. There is also the Swedish woman who rents the blue house above the port for the season, a photographer, tall, and they have been seen walking the northern path twice now. I do not know what that is and it is not my business and I notice I have an opinion about it anyway, which I am keeping to myself, as you have correctly identified is my habit.
He is forty-three. I know because it came up sideways, the way ages do, through a conversation about something else entirely, a singer we both knew who had died young. He said it the way people say a number that has recently surprised them, still getting accustomed to it in the mouth.
For Mirna: late October. I couldn’t tell you how I know this or whether I simply invented it, but when she asks, tell her he feels like the end of October year round, and that will tell her more than a date would anyway.
What he wouldn’t tell me.
I have been sitting with this one since your letter arrived and I think the answer is not a single thing but a shape. There is something he has come here to be quiet about. Not to forget, I don’t think, but to let settle, the way you let sediment settle in a bottle before you pour. He carries it without wearing it on the outside and most days you would not know it was there. But occasionally, not often, he goes somewhere behind the eyes for a moment, mid-sentence, mid-meal, and then comes back and continues. He never explains the pause. I have never asked. The asking would change something between us that I prefer to leave unchanged.
What I think it is, I will not write. Not because I am saving it for myself, though you will say I am, but because I genuinely do not know enough to name it and I would rather give you silence than a wrong answer dressed up as an insight.
He asked me last week whether I had ever left the island for more than a year at a stretch. I told him about Thessaloniki, the four years, the particular homesickness that is not for a place. He listened the way he listens. Then he said, quietly, that he understood the difference. He did not elaborate and I did not push and we sat there with it between us like something neither of us needed to move.
June. Yes. I have put the good wine in the cool room at the back. We will sit at Makis’s on the first night the way we always do and you can decide for yourself what you make of this fellow now amongst us.
Your cousin,
Nikos
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