8

We stood by the side of the road, pissing in the wind. A hunter in a camouflage jacket came up out of the woods, called a greeting. Steam drifted up from the riverbed."Where do we go next?”"We cross this range, we eat lunch, then we drive south.”"Good," he said."You like that idea.”"As long as we drive. I want to keep driving. I like the driving.”The mountains here contained a sense of time, geologic time. Rounded, colorless, unwooded. They lay in embryo, a process unfolding, or a shriveled dying perhaps. They had the look of naked events. But what else? It took me awhile to understand in what precise way these pale masses, southwest of Argos, seemed so strange and irreducible, in what way they worked a mental labor in me, forcing me to shift my eyes time and again, keep to the wheel, look to the road. They were mountains as semantic rudiments, barest definitions of themselves."Maybe it'll be warmer down there.”"How far down?”"All the way," I said. "Where Europe ends.”"I don't mind the cold.”Tap had nothing to say about the landscape. He seemed interested in what we saw, even engrossed at times, but said nothing, looked out the window, tramped the hills. Eventually I did the same, talking about anything but what was out there. We let the features gather, the low skies and mists, the hilltops edged with miles of old walls, fallen battlements, that particular brooding woe of the Peloponnese. It hovers almost everywhere, war memory, a heaviness and death. Prankish castles, Turkish fortresses, ruined medieval towns, the gateways and vaulted cisterns, the massive limestone walls, the shaft graves, the empty churches with their faded All-Creator floating in the dome, the curved Lord, the non-Euclidean, and the votive lamps below, the walnut throne, the icons in the side galleries, Byzantine blood and gold. All we did was climb, drive and climb. For three days the weather was overcast and cold. We climbed the rubble trails, the goat and donkey paths, the tunnel stairways, the rutted spiral tracks to upper towns, we climbed the Gothic towers, the broad ramps of Mycenaean palace mounds."When I'm swimming, Dad.”"Yes.”"And I put my head under the water.”"Yes.”"How come the water doesn't rush into my ears and nose and fill my whole body, sending me to the bottom, where I'm crushed by the pressure?”South. The plains and orchards. Bare poplars in the distance, a combed silk shimmer. This wasn't a bad road. Others unsurfaced, some half washed off the edge of mountains, or rock-scattered, or ending in a pile of gravel, machines scaled with gray mud."That's it," he said. "That's the question. I'm finished.”Now, ahead, high above us, the hammered sheet, the broad snowy summit of Taygetus. This is the range that thrusts down through the Mani, the middle peninsula of the southern Peloponnese, the middle tit, Owen had called it, all mountain and wild coast.That whole afternoon we saw half a dozen cars, as many men with dogs and guns. A man riding a horse, a woman who walked behind him holding the horse's tail.The towns were small, with empty streets and squares. Wind blew across the olive groves, causing a wild tremor, a kind of panic, treetops going silver. We passed rubble fields, rock walls, groups of whale-back boulders, hillsides covered with enclosures of rough stone.We waited out a downpour in a deserted village square. An old church, a well, a cut-back mulberry tree. The rain was continuous, a single wavering surface, beating on the roof and hood. It was Christmas Day.A mountain cloud kept rolling toward a white village, then merged with warmer air and vanished. Again it fell, like a rush or slide of timeless snow, disappearing in the air above the village.In our mood of reticent observation, of speaking of other things, the journey through the Mani became something like a pure rite of seeing. This was appropriate, I thought. If Athens is a place where people breathe the spoken word, if much of Greece is this, then the Mani forms an argument for silence, for finding a way to acknowledge the bleakness that carries something human in it. Tap peered through the windshield, he looked at things with an odd thoughtfulness. We would see what was here, see clearly through the rain shrouds that hung in the gorges, through the bluish smoke high-piled on the coast.We came to a town that was larger than the others, built at a crossroads, a hotel on the edge of it, two-story cement, boarded shut. I drove slowly down a narrow street to what I thought might be the main square, small as it was, halfhearted, oddly shaped, an historical pause. In the narrowness of this place the stone houses loomed. We got out in a light rain, flexing our legs, and walked toward a cobbled street that seemed to lead down to the water. Doors opened in abandoned houses, wind-swayed. We heard goat-bells nearby and passed a church, seeing three goats come over a broken wall. There were more houses with swinging doors, a butcher shop with an empty meat case, a man standing in the dark near the counter.When we started down the stone path a wind came cutting up to meet us and we looked at each other and turned around. At the end of a street, bulking high over the road we'd just been on, was a massive anvil rock, maybe five hundred feet tall, a dark presence, a power like a voice in the sky. I spotted a café, tall windows, someone moving about. I told Tap to wait in the car and I went inside.It was a shabby place, two tables occupied. A man stood in a doorway at the back. It wasn't clear whether he was in charge or just hanging around. It was that kind of place, run by someone who drops in when he thinks of it. I asked the man, in Greek, about hotels nearby. He made a barely perceptible sign, a head movement, the smallest action of eyes and lips. Total disdain. Utter and aloof and final dismissal of all subject matter pertaining to this question, now and forever. A soul shrug. A gesture that placed the question outside the human environment, the things men will rouse themselves to discuss.He was a grave man with wavy black hair, a thick mustache. I crowded him, as I tended to do when speaking Greek, in order to avoid being overheard by others, and said in an earnest halting way that I had three maps of the area south of here, the area where the main road makes its deepest penetration, then turns to go up the opposite coast. And the maps were all different. And I wondered if he could look at the maps and tell me which one was accurate, if any. The people at the nearest table, not Greeks, stopped talking when I was halfway through my recitation. This made me nervous, of course. Not that it mattered to the black-haired man. He said something I didn't understand, three, maybe four words, looking past me to the front window.The voices resumed. I bought some chocolate bars for Tap. Then I asked if there was a toilet. The man looked to his left and I asked if this meant outside and he looked again and I saw that it did.I walked through an alley, across a muddy yard to the toilet. It was the terminal shithouse of the Peloponnese. The walls were splattered with shit, the bowl was clogged, there was shit on the floor, on the toilet seat, on the fixtures and pipes. An inch of exhausted piss lay collected around the base of the toilet, a minor swamp in the general wreckage and mess. In the chill wind, the soft sweet rain, this doleful shed was another plane of experience. It had a history, a reek of squatting armies, centuries of war, plunder, siege, blood feuds. I stood five feet from the bowl to urinate, tip-toed. How strange that people used this place, still. It was like an offering to Death, to stand there directing my stream toward that porcelain hole.Driving slowly, nosing the car out of town, I passed the café, aware we were being watched, although I wasn't sure by whom. We headed south again, in misty light, sharing some chocolate. Soon we began seeing tower houses, tall narrow structures, flat-roofed except where broken near the top. They stood in the bare landscape, solitary pieces, chess pieces, unfigured, raised straight in the dead afternoon. They looked less like houses, former houses, than some mysterious use of the local stone."Was I born during the Vietnam war?”"Don't sound so depressed. You're not scarred for life, I don't think.”"But was I?”"Yes. It was our favorite war, your mother's and mine. We were both against it but she insisted on being more against it than I was. It got to be a contest, a running battle. We used to have terrific arguments.”"Not smart.”This is what he said on those occasions when another kid might say "dumb" or "pretty stupid." Not smart. A whole world existed in this distinction.He was belted in, wearing a watch cap, suspended in one of his inward states. He possessed an eerie calm at such times and was capable of the most unsettling questions about himself, his degree of sanity, his chances of living past the age of twenty, figured against world conflicts, new diseases, in a studious monotone. It was almost a talent, a knack he had, these elaborate balances, the way he dwelt in his own mind as a statistician, a neutral weigher of destinies."What do Sherpas do?" I said."Climb mountains.”"What's in Arecibo?”"The radio telescope. The big dish.”"Let me think of some more.”"Think of some more.”"Let me think," I said.On a plateau in the distance, separated by open sky, were two clusters of tower houses, long gray forms rising out of the rocks and scrub. The houses were set at varying heights so that in aggregate they resembled a modern skyline seen from a certain distance, a certain elevation, in the rain and haze, in ruins. I felt we were coming upon something no one had approached in a thousand years. A lost history. A pair of towered cities set at the end of the continent.They were only villages, of course, and there was nothing very lost about them. It only seemed that way, here, in the Mani, in a landscape of rocks. We found a dirt road and drove into the first of the towns. The road was unpaved all the way in, turned to mud in some places, deep pools in others. Some of the buildings were clearly inhabited, although we saw no one. There were several recent structures, made of the same stone, among the broken towers. Walled cactus gardens. House numbers in green paint. Utility poles."Who am I named after?”"You know the answer to that.”"But he died.”"That has nothing to do with it. When you go back to London, ask your mother and your aunt to tell you about his eccentricities. He had some juicy quirks. That's a local fruit you ought to try. And when you go back to Victoria, write me a letter now and then.”"But why am I named after him?”"Your mother and I both loved him. He was a sweet man, your grandfather. Even your nickname comes from him. Some of his business associates called him Tap. Thomas Arthur Pattison, get it? But the family didn't use the name much. We called him Tommy. He was Tommy, you were Tap. A couple of funny guys. Even though you're Thomas Arthur Axton and not Pattison, we wanted to call you Tap, after him.”"How did he die?”"You want to know how he died so you can decide whether or not that's how you're going to die. Well there's no connection, so forget it.”A dog slept on a mound of olive pulp. We went a short distance, then turned off the main road again, left this time, and drove slowly up into the other towered hamlet. We saw a woman and child retreat from a doorway, heard gunshots in the hills, two soft bursts, hunters again. Stones were arranged in circular figures, threshing floors. Some houses had slate roofs topped with stones. Stones were crammed into window spaces."Here's one for you. What goes on at the Bonneville salt flats?”"Rocket cars. High-speed tests.”"What do you think of when I say Kimberley?”"Wait, let me think.”Who are they, the people in the café? Are they members? At one table an old man, a chipped white cup. At the other table a group, three or four, not Greeks. They listened when I asked about the maps. How do I know they aren't Greek? Who are they, what are they doing here, this desolate place, in winter? What am I doing here, and have I stumbled across them, and do I want to go back, to look again, to be sure, one way or the other, with my son in hand?"South Africa.”"Now if I get it, it's because you gave me a hint.”"Mining.”"Thanks for practically telling me.”"What is it then?”Morose, slumped in his seat. "Diamond mining," he said.Minutes later we approached the coast again. The last ridge of Taygetus fell to the sea, a clean line of descent in the fading light. I stopped the car to look at the maps. Tap pointed north, catching sight of something through my side of the windshield, and after a moment I was able to see a dark mass of towers set among the terraced hills."I think we ought to find a hotel or rooming house. At least figure out where we are.”"Just this last place," he said."You like the tower houses.”He kept peering through the glass."Or is it the driving you like?”"This one last place," he said. "Then I promise we can stop.”The road up was a dirt track, all stones and mud. Three or four runnels came splashing past the car, merged in places, and I began to think about the jagged rocks, the deep mud, the force of the racing water, the growing dark. Tap broke a section of chocolate from the bar, then subdivided, a piece for each of us. It was raining hard again."No signs. If we knew the name of this place, we could find it on the map. Then we'd know where we are for a change.”"Maybe there's someone up there we can ask.”"Although it's probably not on the map anyway.”"We can ask," he said.The muddy streams jumped ruts and smaller stones. I spotted dead cypress trees above us. The road kept turning, there was cactus hanging off the edges, stunted brush."First you see something in front of the car and then it goes past the way it really is.”"Like a tree," I said."Then you look in the mirror and you see the same thing, only it looks different and it moves faster, a lot faster. Whoby obis thobat.”"Too bad your mother isn't here. You could have a long talk in your native tongue. Have they given her a hole in the ground yet?”"She has an office.”"It's only a matter of time. There's a hole in the ground somewhere in British Columbia that she's determined to end up in. Is that a question you were asking?”"There are no questions in Ob. You can ask a question but you don't say it like a question in English. You say it like a regular sentence.”The last loop in the road took us away from our destination, momentarily, and provided a look at another towered hamlet, set along a distant ridge, and still another, a smaller cluster, silhouetted on a headland way below us. We turned up onto a long straight approach to the village and then I saw something that sent a chill through me, a delayed chill (I had to think, to translate). I stopped the car and sat there, staring out over the textured fields.It was a fallen rock, a ten-foot boulder standing by the roadcut to our left, a flat-faced reddish block with two white words painted across its width, the pigment running down off the letters in rough trickles, the accent mark clearly in place.Ta Onómata."Why are we stopping?”"It was stupid, coming up here. My fault. We ought to be finding a place to stay, some food.”"We're turning around, you mean, just when we get here?”"You had your drive up. Now you'll have your drive back down.”"What's painted on that rock? Do you think that's what they use for road signs here?”"No. It's not a road sign.”"What is it?”"Just someone writing. We've seen writing on walls and buildings everywhere we've gone. Politics. We've even seen crowns, long live the king. If there's no wall around, I guess they use the nearest thing. A rock in this case.”"Is it politics?”"No. It's not politics.”"What is it?”"I don't know, Tap.”"Do you know what it means?”"The Names," I said.