It wasn’t until the next day that the storm had abated to the extent that a small boat from Kommos dared venture out on the waters and row over to the rock, and so it was only then, Korin wrote, once the wind had dropped, early next afternoon, that they discovered that what had seemed from a distance to be a wreck beyond salvaging, was most certainly a wreck, but at a closer view, not entirely beyond salvaging, and the improvised rescue party was astonished to discover three, and maybe even four survivors in one of the main cabins that had not been flooded: three, they signaled by hand to those on the shore, and a possible fourth lashed to this or that post, the four unconscious but certainly alive, or at least three of them were alive and the heart of the fourth was also possibly beating, so they cut these four free of the posts and brought them out, they being the only four for the rest had been engulfed in the flood and drowned, some sixty, eighty or even hundred of them, they said later, who knows how many dreaming their last by the time they found them, but no longer in any position to feel pain, as they put it; while these three, the rescuers said, or maybe even four, had miraculously survived, and so they quickly brought them out of the cabin and transferred them to the boat immediately, one after the other, and set off back again leaving the rest, the entire ship, just as it was, since they knew exactly what would happen, what would come to pass, as, in two days, it did, when a powerful wave broke the by now utterly shattered wreck into two, whereupon it slid off the rock and, suddenly, almost unbelievably quickly, within a few minutes, sank beneath the surface, so that a quarter of an hour later the last of the waves was sweeping smoothly over the place it had been and across the shore where stood the entire village of the small fishing community of Kommos, every man, woman, child and dotard, mute and still, since within a quarter of an hour nothing, but nothing, remained of that huge, strange and terrifying vessel, not even the very last wave, only the three living survivors and a fourth who might survive the catastrophe, four, all in all, out of the sixty, the eighty, the hundred, only four.
In the days of painful recuperation that followed they pronounced their names differently each time so the locals tended to stick to the names they claimed to have heard on the first day, in other words they referred to one as Kasser, one as Falke, one as Bengazza and the fourth as Toót, feeling that this was probably the most correct version, assuming that everyone took it for granted that the four names — names that sounded peculiar to their ears — were merely approximations, and not within hailing distance of the possible originals, though to tell the truth this was the least of their problems, for contrary to their earlier experience of those cast on their shores, those whose names, origins, homelands and fate would bit by bit, and in fact fairly quickly, become plain, with these people everything — names, origins, homelands and fate — became progressively more mysterious, that is to say their foreignness and peculiarity did not diminish but grew in astonishing fashion with the passing of days, so that by the time they were well enough to leave their beds and ventured with extreme caution out into the open air, that moment being described in that wonderful chapter, said Korin, pronouncing the word chapter in English, in particular detail, there stood these perfectly mysterious four men of whom less than nothing was known because they consistently avoided questions put to them in Babylonian, the language—Korin used the English word again — they shared, albeit both sides spoke it only brokenly, by answering to something different, so that even Mastemann, a recent foreign castaway from Gurnia, to the east of the island, a man not much given to doubts but willing to state his opinions forcefully, appeared to be in doubt, yes, even he, Mastemann, fell silent as he watched them from behind the wagon as they strolled silently through the tiny village, as they ambled behind the fig trees and eventually settled down to dawdle in an olive grove and watch the sun decline on the western horizon.
The whole document, Korin said to the woman, seemed to be speaking of the Garden of Eden, every sentence of the manuscript that described the village and the shore, he said, dwelling on the unsurpassable beauty of the place, as though it were not some message it was conveying but more as if it were wanting to conduct itself back into paradise, for it not only mentioned this beauty, elaborated on it and proclaimed it, but lingered on it, in other words it established, in its own strange way, the fact that this peculiar beauty, Korin stressed the word “beauty” in English, was not simply an aspect of the landscape but all it contained, that calm, and, yes, delight, the calm and delight it radiated, suggesting that whatever was good was indisputably eternal, and in this way, Korin continued, embellishing the picture for her, it established the fact that, having been created good, everything continued very good, all of it, the brilliant red sunlight, the dazzling white of the cliffs, the subtle green of the valleys and the grace of the people inhabiting it, commuting as they did between the cliffs and the valleys, or, to put it another way, said Korin, everything — the red and white and green, the grace of the mule-drawn wagons as they trundled along, the octopus nets drying in the wind, the amulets around people’s necks, the ornamental hairpins, the workshops offering pots and pans, the fishing boats and the mountain shrines, in a word the earth itself, as well as the sea and the sky (the sky, he said in English) — but really everything was calm and delightful, and, what was more, real, real in the full sense of the word, or that at least was how Korin described the state of affairs, when, having finished the morning’s work, he attempted to sketch the place out for her, though his efforts as usual were doomed since it was clearly pointless describing anything to her in whatever painterly detail, now or at any time, for she not only stood there as indifferent as ever, but, as he saw when she happened to turn a little, she had been thoroughly beaten up, in other words it was not just a matter of having no idea in what language to speak to her, that is if she was listening at all to the monologue Korin had been trying to deliver in Hungarian since about eleven that morning to about half-past twelve, going on to one, that afternoon — a monologue supplemented with the odd English word he had gleaned from the dictionary — but that the blown veins were clearly visible on her face, her eyes were swollen and there were abrasions on her brow, possibly because she had ventured out at night and had been attacked by someone on the way home, it was impossible to tell, though it was deeply disturbing to Korin, who, for that very reason, pretended not to have noticed anything and went on speaking, picking up his monologue in the evening until the interpreter finally appeared in the kitchen when, summoning his courage, he rushed over to him and asked him what had happened, and who was it who had dared assault the young lady: assaulted her! the interpreter expostulated, beside himself, to his lover, her! he bellowed at the figure crouched, wide-eyed with terror at the end of the bed, while he paced furiously up and down the room, for God’s sake, who does he think he is? what business was it of this dumb asshole what they did or didn’t do with their lives, for God’s sake, who does he think he is, does he think he can sniff around us like some damned dog and try to hold us to account about our lives! well, excuse me, but that’s not okay! he growled at his lover, yes, he sent him on his way all right, the sly pitiful asshole, let him rot up someone else’s ass, he told him all right, until there was hardly any breath left in him, left him gasping, saying he only meant to this or only meant to that, to which he, the interpreter, replied simply that if he wanted to avoid a busted nose like hers, he will shut the fuck up right now with questions, at which point, naturally, Korin slid off like some damn snake, into his own room and closed the door behind him so quietly it would not have disturbed a fly, the interpreter insisted, for that door made no noise, no sir, no noise whatsoever.