There was talk about what had happened among the hotel people and some of the guests from the Cabins, but nothing was clear. It was part of a local feud about fishing rights, or it was political — the puppet-man was a known troublemaker from another village — or the whole thing had no point at all; it was one of those episodes that explode out of nowhere in the electric south, having no cause and therefore requiring no explanation, but gathering up into itself all sorts of hostilities— personal, political, some with their roots in nothing more than youthful high-spirits and the frustrations and closeness of village life at the end of a hot spell. Up on the terraces women were carding wool. Goats nibbled among the rocks, finding rubbery thistles in impossible places. The fishermen's nets, black, brown, umber, were stretched on poles in the sun; and the sea, as if suspended between the same slender uprights, rose smooth, dark, heavy, fading where it imperceptibly touched the sky into mother-of-pearl.
But today the hippies did not appear, and by afternoon the news was abroad that their caves had been raided. In the early hours, before it was light, they had been driven out of town and given a firm warning that they were not to return.
The port that night was quiet. A wind had sprung up, and waves could be heard on the breakwater. The lights swayed overhead, casting uneasy shadows over the rough stones of the promenade and the faces of the few tourists who had chosen to eat. It wasn't cold, but the air was full of sharp little grits and the tablecloths had been damped to keep them from lifting. The locals knew when to come out and when not to. They were right.
The wind fell again overnight. Sylvia, waking briefly, heard it suddenly drop and the silence begin.
The new day was sparklingly clear. There was just breeze enough, a gentle lapping of air, to make the waves gleam silver at the edge of the sand and to set the flag fluttering on its staff, high up on the cliff where the sailor, the same one, was watching for sharks. Jason went to talk to him after paying his usual visit to the fishermen.
Keeping her eye on the child as he made his round of the beach, Sylvia read a little, dozed off, and must for a moment have fallen asleep where Jason had half-buried her in the sand. She was startled into uneasy wakefulness by a hard, clear, cracking sound that she couldn't account for, and was still saying to herself, in the split-second of starting up, Where am I? Where is Jason? when she caught, out of the heel of her eye, the white of his shorts where he was just making his way up the cliff face to his sailor; and in the same instant saw the sailor, above him, sag at the knees, clutching with both hands at the centre of himself, then hang for a long moment in mid-air and fall.
In a flash she was on her feet and stumbling to where the child, crouching on all fours, had come to a halt, and might have been preparing, since he couldn't have seen what had happened, to go on.
It was only afterwards, when she had caught him in her arms and they were huddled together under the ledge, that she recalled how her flight across the beach had been accompanied by a burst of machine-gun fire from the village. Now, from the direction of the Naval College, came an explosion that made the earth shake.
None of this, from the moment of her sitting up in the sand till the return of her senses to the full enormity of the thing, had lasted more than a minute by the clock, and she had difficulty at first in convincing herself that she was fully awake. Somewhere in the depths of herself she kept starting up in that flash of time before the sailor fell, remarking how hot it was, recording the flapping of a sheet of paper in Alec's abandoned typewriter — he must have gone snorkeling or into the village for a drink — and the emptiness of the dazzling sea. Where am I? Where is Jason? Then it would begin all over again. It was in going over it the second time, with the child already safe in her arms, that she began to tremble and had to cover her mouth not to cry out.
Suddenly two men dropped into the sand below them. They carried guns. Sylvia and the child, and two or three others who must have been in the water, were driven at gun-point towards the village. There was a lot of gesticulation, and some muttering that under the circumstances seemed hostile, but no actual violence.
They were pushed, silent and unprotesting, into the crowded square. Alec was already there. They moved quickly together, too shocked to do more than touch briefly and stand quietly side by side.
There were nearly a hundred people crushed in among the pine trees, about a third of them tourists. It was unnaturally quiet, save for the abrupt starting up of the cicadas with their deafening beat; then, as at a signal, their abrupt shutting off again. Men with guns were going through the crowd, choosing some and pushing them roughly away towards the quay; leaving others. Those who were left stared immediately ahead, seeing nothing.
One of the first to go was the young waiter from the hotel. As the crowd gave way a little to let him pass, he met Sylvia's eye, and she too looked quickly away; but would not forget his face with the deep vertical lines below the cheekbones and the steady gaze.
There was no trouble. At last about twenty men had been taken and a smaller number of women. The square was full of open spaces. Their group, and the other groups of tourists, looked terribly exposed. Among these dark strangers involved in whatever business they were about— women in coarse black dresses and shawls, men in dungarees — they stood barefoot in briefs and bikinis, showing too much flesh, as in some dream in which they had turned up for an important occasion without their clothes. It was this sense of being both there and not that made the thing for Sylvia so frighteningly unreal. They might have been invisible. She kept waiting to come awake, or waiting for someone else to come awake and release her from a dream that was not her own, which she had wandered into by mistake and in which she must play a watcher's part.
Now one of the gunmen was making an announcement. There was a pause. Then several of those who were left gave a faint cheer.
The foreigners, who had understood nothing of what the gunman said, huddled together in the centre of the square and saw only slowly that the episode was now over; they were free to go. They were of no concern to anyone here. They never had been. They were, in their odd nakedness, as incidental to what had taken place as the pine trees, the little painted ikon in its niche in the church wall, and all those other mute, unseeing objects before whom such scenes are played.
Alec took her arm and they went quickly down the alley to the quay. Groups of armed men were there, standing about in the sun. Most of them were young, and one, a schoolboy in shorts with a machine-gun in his hand, was being berated by a woman who must have been his mother. She launched a torrent of abuse at him, and then began slapping him about the head while he cringed and protested, hugging his machine-gun but making no attempt to protect himself or move away.
4
There had been a coup. One of the Germans informed them of it the moment they came into the lobby. He had heard it on his transistor. What they had seen was just the furthest ripple of it, way out at the edge. It had all, it seemed, been bloodless, or nearly so. The hotel manager, bland and smiling as ever, scouring his ear with an elongated fingernail, assured them there was nothing to worry about. A change of government, what was that? They would find everything — the beach, the village — just the same, only more orderly. It didn't concern them.
But one of the Swedes, who had something to do with the legation, had been advised from the capital to get out as soon as possible, and the news passed quickly to the rest. Later that night a boat would call at a harbour further up the coast. The Club had hired a bus and was taking its foreign guests to meet it, but could not take the hotel people as well.