I did not complete my account of the visit to Lydia 's studio yesterday. Yesterday or the day before? My sense of time, of the sequence of days, is growing vaguer, spending as I do so much of my life enclosed here, writing all hours, eating and sleeping irregularly. It is afternoon now. Outside the prolonged outcry of cicadas, buzz of summer. I cannot work on the balcony, it is too exposed, I am too vulnerable there to distraction and fear. So I sit here in pyjamas, against the heat.
I remember the light. It was the time of day when light is fully revived, fully quickened, but mild still, blooming on the white walls of houses. (Our island houses are white for the most part, Excellency. Shallow roofs, railed balconies, heavy wooden shutters). I stood for some time at the upper end of Caritas Street looking down over the orange trees and the dome of the cami at a segment of sea with fishing caiques laid on it one behind the other, receding into the haze of distance. The nearest had a red hull. Flat, resinous gleam on the sea, and the boats looked trapped in it, expiring with a faint tremor of sails. Not real movement, probably, but a trick of heat or light. There is no real movement.
From somewhere near at hand, somewhere above me, the soft, plaintive bleatings of a sheep. I looked up but could not see it. The light hurt my eyes. Waiting on some balcony for the sacrificial knife. How far is it off now, the Sacrifice Festival? Three, four days. Caritas Street was like a tilted trough, brimming with light. Intermittent tic of shadow cast by the low-flying falcons. My steps were muffled in the dust. That solitary bleating started off others. From all around me, all down the street and the streets around, plaints of tethered sheep. Bought some days in advance when the prices are better, tethered to balcony rails or gate posts, they suffer in the heat. The individual sound is trivial, but terrible anguish in this sustained collective cry. It rains down on me like the light. Through this chorus, from a neighbouring street I heard the jingle of harness, the creak of a burden.
Three people I passed on my way up this street, but spoke to none of them, fearing a rebuff or worse. I saw myself with their eyes: my obesity, crumpled suit, straw hat, monogrammed handkerchief cascading from pocket. They do not see my fear.
I have betrayed myself, Excellency, in a number of ways. Neither deliberately nor involuntarily. It has happened as things happen in the constraint of dreams. I have consorted openly with Turkish functionaries. Sometimes I use Turkish forms of salutation, sometimes Greek. I go to the mosque, perform the gestures of prayer. I also attend church, where I do not forget to cross myself. I am now in religion as I have long been in sexual matters, utriusque capax. The Moslem prayer fascinates me, the gestures, hands and minds reaching towards the void… I know why I have allowed myself to become suspect, put my life in danger. I have understood something, Excellency. Human beings prefer destruction to perfect balance. What is intolerable, more intolerable than anything atrocious that the mind can think, is equilibrium. Twenty years, my stipend arriving regularly through the Banque Ottomane, my reports going out month after month. No response, no reaction. You see? A closed circle. A continuous celebration. And in this clarity of the light, as Herr Gesing would say. Intolerable. You see, doubtless you see, why I had to break out. My way is to make myself a victim. Others will break out by seeking me…
At the end of Caritas Street there is a small paved square with a periptero in the middle and a narrow border of hibiscus bushes on two sides. The far side faces Avenue Alexandras. I paused here, debating whether to buy cigarettes. I never spend even small sums without deliberation, especially at this time of the month, with my next remittance still two weeks away. As I was hesitating a ragged squad of troops, with a corporal at the head, came marching along the avenue in the direction of the garrison barracks. They were marching at ease, rifles slung.
Mongolian faces these, flat, big-boned, sullen with weariness. None of them glanced in my direction.
I bought the cigarettes. On the other side of the avenue is where the Turkish quarter begins. I met Zeki Bey, the mudur of the school. Like many teachers and intellectual persons, Zeki Bey is on the side of constitutional reform. As far as I have been able to discover he has no direct associations with the Young Turk movement, but he is certainly sympathetic to some of their aims. (I once alleged to your officials at the Ministry that he was a freemason, but he had beaten me at chess and I was piqued.) We talked mainly about the killing of the five Turkish soldiers in the ambush. I asked him if he thought the garrison had been strengthened, mentioning to him the troops I had just seen. He said that he thought this was probably the case, though he had seen no troops arrive. Probably they had disembarked at night. Zeki Bey gave it as his opinion that the rebels in the hills are being actively supported, with guns and money, by agents in the pay of Athens. He spoke as one with special knowledge, but everybody says the same thing. 'This American,' he said. 'Why does he remain offshore so long?'
'Who, the sponge-fisher?'
Zeki Bey smiled slightly, as if he pitied me. An offensive smile, Excellency. 'They have searched his boat,' he said. 'This morning.'
'Who told you that?' I said, smiling in my turn, as if I did not believe it.
But Zeki has too much selfesteem to be drawn in that way. 'I was told,' he said, and stopped smiling. I judged it better not to pursue the matter. I do not know if they found anything, Excellency. Lydia thought not, when I spoke to her later at the studio.
I must break off for a while – my eyes are heavy. Late afternoon is not a good time for me. Night is the best time for composition.
She came to the door in response to my knock. She explained at once, though seemingly without displeasure, that she was working. I thought for a moment or two she was going to send me away. But she needed a break, she said, she had been working all morning. I followed her upstairs – the ground floor of the house is completely unoccupied. We went through the small living-room into her studio. This was originally two rooms and is now one, running the whole width of the house, with a large square window at both ends. I am always slightly ill at ease in this room, self-conscious, because of the flooding amplitude of light and the clutter of objects.
In the centre of the room she stopped and turned to face me. She was wearing a sort of turban, white in colour, tied at the nape of the neck, and covering her ears and hair completely, so that the face she presented to me was that of an accolyte of some kind, a naked, devotional oval, and this impression was strengthened by her devotee's long smock of coarse white muslin gathered at the waist, reaching midway down the calves. Her legs and feet bare. Narrow, beautiful feet. On the smock, on the right side, just below the ribs, a smudge of red paint. Just the one mark. She had wiped her hand there, presumably.
'You have lost weight,' she said.
'Dieting,' I said. I was so pleased that she had noticed me to this extent that I found her gaze difficult to support. I motioned towards the painting in progress, on the easel, and said something appreciative about it. I forget now what. It was nearly finished as far as I could judge – an island landscape with peasants and goats. It was good, in the way that Lydia 's paintings are always good: classical in spirit, very exact in perspective, with a loving fidelity to the volume and texture of things – leaves, rocks, clouds. Also to the effects of light. This clarity of the light.