In the light of a lowering sky the city is immediate and sculptured. None of summer's white palls, its failures of distance and perspective. There are shadow-angles, highlighted surfaces, areas of grayish arcs and washes. Laundry blows on rooftops and balconies. Against an urgent sky, with dull thunder pounding over the gulf, this washwork streaming in the wind can be an emblematic and touching thing. Always the laundry, always the lone old woman in black who keeps to a corner of the elevator, the bent woman in endless mourning. She disturbs the composure of the modern building with its intercom and carpeted lobby, its marble veneer.Some nights the wind never stops, beginning in a clean shrill pitch that broadens and deepens to a careless and suspenseful force, rattling shutters, knocking things off the balconies, creating a pause in one's mind, a waiting-for-the-full-force-to-hit. Inside the apartment, closet doors swing open, creak shut. The next day it's there again, a clatter in the alleys.A single cloud, low-lying, serpentine, clings to the long ridge of Hymettus. The mountain seems to collect weather, to give it a structure, an aspect beyond the physical, weather's menace, say, or the inner light of things. The sun and moon rise behind the mountain and in the last moments of certain days a lovely dying appears in the heights, a delivering into violet, burnt rose. The cloud is there now, a shaped thing, dense and white, concealing the radar that faces east.Girls wear toggle coats. In heavy rain there is flooding, people die. A certain kind of old man is seen in a black beret, hands folded behind him as he walks.Charles Maitland paid a visit, making a number of sound effects as he got out of his rubberized slicker. He walked to an armchair and sat down."Time for my midnight cup of cocoa.”It was seven o'clock and he wanted a beer."Where are your rugs?" he said."I don't have any.”"Everyone in the area has rugs. We all have rugs. It's what we do, James. Buy rugs.”"I'm not interested in rugs. I'm not a rug person, as the Bordens would say.”"I was over there yesterday. They have some Turkomans and Baluchis, fresh from customs. Very nice indeed.”"Means nothing to me.”"Weaving districts are becoming inaccessible. Whole countries in fact. It's almost too late to go to the source. It is too late in many cases. They seem to go together, carpet-weaving and political instability.”We thought about this."Or martial law and pregnant women," I said."Yes," he said slowly, looking at me. "Or gooey desserts and queues for petrol.”"Plastic sandals and public beheadings.”"Pious concern for the future of the Bedouins. What does that go with?”He sat forward now, turning the pages of a magazine on the coffee table. A sound of rain on the terrace rail."Who is it, do you think?" I said. "Is it the Greek? Eliades?”He looked at me sharply."Just a guess," I said. "I noticed them at dinner that night.”"You noticed nothing. She would never give anyone cause to notice. Whatever she's doing, I promise you it's not being noticed.”"I know I shouldn't be bringing it up. I've no right. But it's been hanging in the air. Even your son makes reference. I don't want us to have to adopt a cryptic language or a way of avoiding each other's eyes.”"What Greek?" he said."Eliades. The night David and Lindsay took their famous swim. Intense man, black beard.”"Who was he with?”"The German. There was a German. He was there to meet someone who never showed up. Someone David knows. Refrigeration systems.”"You saw nothing. I could never believe she gave anyone cause to notice.”"It's not what I saw. It's what I heard. She spoke to him in Greek.”I waited for him to tell me how stupid it was to believe this meant something. I felt stupid, saying it. But the sound of her voice, the way it fell, the way it became a sharing, a trust, drawing them away from the rest of us, the way it shaded toward a murmur-the moment haunted me, I think.Charles didn't tell me I was stupid. He sat quietly turning the pages, possibly thinking back to that night, trying to recollect. There were so many dinners, friends, transients, so many names and accents. I could see him try to construct a summer night around that single image, Lindsay standing on the beach, in half light, laughing. He couldn't connect it. One more sadness at the middle of things."I went clean off the rails in Port Harcourt. She left me, you know.”"I know.”"There was no one else. Just left.”"She was lonely. What do you expect?”"The Greek," he said, like a name mislaid. "Was it in Tunis I met him? Did we see each other later at the airport, come back to Athens together? I took him home for a drink. We all sat around and talked. An acceptable scenario, wouldn't you say? I didn't see him again until the night you describe.”We went to a movie together, went to dinner, saw a man so fat he had to move sideways down a flight of steps. The wind kept me up that night until two or three, a steady noise, a rustling in the walls.When I walked into the lobby the next evening Niko was at the desk with his coffee cup and newspaper. His small daughter was in his lap and he had to keep shifting her to read the paper.Cold.Cold, I said.Rain.Small rain.I talked to the girl briefly, waiting for the elevator to descend. I said she had two shoes. One, two. I said her eyes were brown, her hair was brown. She knocked the empty coffee cup into the saucer. The concierge's wife came out, a broad woman in house slippers.Cold.Cold.Very cold.Later my father called."What time is it there?" he said.We talked about the time, the weather. He'd received a letter from Tap and a card from Kathryn. Printed at the bottom of the card, he said, was the following sentence: No trees were destroyed to make this card. This annoyed him. Typical Kathryn, he said. Most of his anger came from TV. All that violence, crime, political cowardice, government deception, all that appeasement, that official faintheartedness. It rankled, it curled him into a furious ball, a fetus of pure rage. The six o'clock news, the seven o'clock news, the eleven o'clock news. He sat there collecting it, doubled up with his tapioca pudding. The TV set was a rage-making machine, working at him all the time, giving him direction and scope, enlarging him in a sense, filling him with a world rage, a great stalking soreness and rancor."Do they have exact-change lanes?" he shouted out to me. "What about goat cheese, Murph wants to know. In case we might visit, which I seriously doubt.”When the violet light seeps into Hymettus, when the sky suddenly fills with birds, tall wavering spiral columns, I sometimes want to turn away. These birdforms mingle, flash, soar, change color light to dark, revolve and shimmer, silk scarves turning in the wind. Bands of light pour out of cloud massifs. The mountain is a glowing coal. How is it the city keeps on functioning, buses plowing through the dusk, while these forces converge in the air, natural radiances and laws, this coded flight of birds, a winter's day? (Kathryn would know what kind of birds they are.) Sometimes I think I'm the only one who sees it. Sometimes, too, I go back to whatever I was doing, to my magazine, my English-Greek vocabulary. I come in off the terrace and sit with my back to the sliding door.You don't allow yourself the full pleasure of things.A white-armed traffic cop stands in the dark, gesturing, beckoning to the gathered shapes. I hear the cadenced wail of an ambulance stuck in traffic. How hard it is to find the lyrical mode we've devised to accompany our cities to their nostalgic doom. An evolution of seeing. The sensibility that enables us to see a ruined beauty in these places can't easily be adapted to Athens, where the surface of things is mostly new, where the ruin is differently managed, the demise indistinguishable from the literal building-up and building-out. What happens when a city can't fade longingly toward its end, can't be abandoned piece by piece to its damaged truth, its layered ages of brick and iron? When it contains only the tension and paralysis of the superficial new? Paralysis. This is what the city teaches us to fear.The ambulance stands fast, wailing in the night. The kiosks are lighted now.