Everything Beautiful Began After (24 page)

“I don’t even have a kitchen at my hotel,” you add.

“Then why did you buy it?”

“Because I felt sorry for the fish man.”

She says something to the security guard in Greek and then laughs. But he shrugs and looks at you, not with amusement but with respect—as though he were once a struggling fish man.

The first floor has sculptures that were pulled from the sea. You can tell because the stone resembles a hard gray sponge.

Some cases hold just limbs. Some are green with moss.

Then you wander through a room of gravestones that were discovered at a marine dump by an Albanian laborer. The stones have scenes carved into them.

The final moments of a life imagined by the tired carver.

The dead stare at the living in the full knowledge they have lost their lives. The faces are not detailed because the Greeks understood that one person’s experience is everyone’s.

We all sit down to the same meal, but at different times.

Carved upon one of the graves, a woman called Eirene from the city of Byzantium has died in childbirth. In the relief, her infant daughter is held by the relative who will raise her. Eirene reaches out her hand to touch her child for the first and last time.

In another carving, a man called Andron shakes the hand of a son already dead, and with his other hand touches the cheek of a son who is still living.

The security guard from the front desk is following you at a distance. You are the only visitor in the museum.

Upstairs is a room with three towering bronze statues. They have greened with age—though details are still visible. Each god has an outstretched hand. You sit and look at them for a long time.

You can’t decide if the hands are giving or taking away.

After you vomited in the bathroom last night in the hotel, you cried for several hours on the floor—but then somehow awoke in a different city. Overnight, the set upon which you had played out your small tragedy was taken down and replaced with new scenery.

In the next room is a frieze that leaves you gasping.

A fragment of your life has been cast in marble before your very eyes.

A young woman on a bed has died. She is watched by two men and a child. Asklepios, the Greek god of medicine, stands above the woman with his hands on her neck and back. He is bringing her back to life. The two men and the child watch.

Asklepios’s own mother died while he was still in her womb. But Asklepios’s father fought the flames of his wife’s funeral pyre with a knife between his teeth. Then he sliced open her stomach and ripped out his unborn son.

Growing up, the boy realized he had the ability to heal. His power grew until one day he could bring the dead back to life. For this, Zeus destroyed him with a thunderbolt.

You think of your own father. You imagine the swell of your mother’s womb, the stirring waters as you leave one world for another.

It seems pointless imagining what your brother would be like, because he died when he was a baby.

Things in your mind are shuffling into order.

And you realize that you’ve finally grown up. That youth has finished. In its place you have knowledge, which you must learn to carry. You must also learn to accept that death is the most sophisticated form of beauty, and the most difficult to accept.

From this moment on, you will always be conscious of what you are doing. And any future feeling, whether joy or grief or excitement or regret, will come now with an awareness of its own end—with shadows you never noticed in youth. Variation of feeling will become depth of feeling. And you will appreciate tiny things—and step with the confidence of someone overjoyed to know he is doomed.

You leave the museum and walk slowly up the road with your bag of fish. Cars parked with their bumpers touching. You pass a butcher and then a hairdresser. The women are sitting in chairs smoking.

A father carries his son on his shoulders. The father has a cigarette in his mouth and the boy is laughing. He holds his father’s hair in clumps. They pass like a small locomotive.

You think of your own parents now.

Sitting in their chairs watching television. You haven’t seen them for so long.

You’ve sent postcards, called them occasionally from Tokyo or London or Beirut. They think you’re traveling for work.

You always tell them you’re fine.

They tell their friends you’re fine. “Up to his neck in Greece,” your father says.

At the end of the street is a yellow telephone booth.

The phone is blue like the sea. You stand inside the booth.

A sticker on the handset says:

You will never know what it means.

You decide to make a call. You’re tired, but the promise of a new life is still with you. It’s the feeling that you can take anything, or that you can accept anything—or that if everything you thought and think turns out to be a lie you wouldn’t be upset or surprised or unable to go on.

You dial the operator. Then you key in your parents’ telephone number in England. The operator tells you to hold on. It rings.

The operator comes back on.

After some confusion, they accept the charges.

Chapter Forty-Eight

DAD:
7501478?

HENRY:
Hi, Dad.

DAD:
Henry?

HENRY:
Hello.

Silence.

DAD:
How are you, son? We haven’t heard from you in ages.

HENRY:
I know.

Dad shouts in the background, “It’s Henry, dear.”

DAD:
Everything okay?

Silence.

HENRY:
Not really.

Silence.

DAD:
Well, I’m sure it will work itself out.

Silence.

DAD:
Henry?

DAD
(
talking to someone in background
): Turn down the telly a minute, dear.

HENRY:
It’s good to hear your voice. Is Mum there?

DAD:
She’s here. What going on? Is everything okay?

HENRY:
Is she okay?

DAD:
She’s watching
EastEnders
. Are you all right? She says hello.

Silence.

DAD:
How’s the digging?

Silence.

DAD:
Henry?

HENRY:
I haven’t been working.

DAD
(
suspicious
): Taking a break?

HENRY:
I’ve been on a break, yes.

Silence.

DAD
(
worried
): Oh.

Silence.

DAD:
We haven’t heard from you in about two months—your mother was getting worried. Last time you called was from Bulgaria—a dig was it?

Silence.

DAD:
Henry? You all right?

HENRY:
Actually, no.

DAD
(
concerned
): What’s happened?

Silence.

DAD:
Henry?

HENRY:
Someone I loved very much has died.

Silence
.

DAD
(
in a quiet, frightened voice
): What?

Silence.

DAD:
Who?

HENRY:
You didn’t know her.

DAD:
Someone you knew there?

HENRY:
Yes, she was French.

DAD:
And she died?

HENRY:
Yes

DAD:
How did she die?

Silence

DAD:
Was it sudden?

HENRY:
She was crushed to death.

Dad relays the story to Mum in a whisper. Mum gasps and grabs the phone.

DAD
(
in background
): Harriet!

MUM:
Henry?

HENRY:
Mum?

Silence.

HENRY:
How was
EastEnders
?

MUM:
It’s still on. Who is dead?

HENRY:
A friend. In the earthquake.

Silence.

MUM
: Two years ago?

HENRy
: About that.

MUM
: Why are you telling us now?

Silence.

HENRY
: I don’t know

MUM
: Has something else happened?

HENRY
: Isn’t that enough?

DAD
(
speaking in background
): He never said anything before.

MUM
: You never said anything before.

HENRy
: I know.

MUM
: You should have told us. We’re your parents.

Silence.

DAD (
coming back on the phone
): Henry, why didn’t you say something?

HENRY
: I don’t know.

DAD
: We thought you were working away happily with the professor.

HENRY
: I was. Or at least I thought I was.

DAD
: What did he say about this?

HENRY
: I haven’t seen him.

DAD
: What do you mean?

Silence.

DAD
(
with grave concern
): Is
he
dead too, Henry?

HENRY
: I don’t think so.

DAD
: You don’t think so? Henry, what’s going on?

HENRY
: He’s not dead—I just haven’t seen him.

DAD
: Where are you?

HENRY
: In a phone booth in Piraeus.

MUM
(
speaking in background
): Where is he now?

DAD (
in background
): In a phone booth somewhere.

MUM
(
in background
): What’s he doing there?

DAD
: What are you doing there? Where are you?

HENRY
: I came to the museum. I’m in Athens.

DAD
: Who is supervising the dig?

HENRY
: I haven’t been to the dig for a while.

DAD
: Why not?

HENRY
: I’ve been traveling.

DAD
: Yes, we know that bit, traveling for work.

Silence.

HENRY
: I don’t know what to do now with my life, but I’m over the worst.

DAD
: We haven’t seen you in years, son.

MUM
(
in background
): Years.

DAD
: Years, Henry.

HENRY
: I know.

DAD
: Do you have any money?

HENRY
: No.

DAD
: Are you still in your flat?

HENRY
: No.

DAD
: Where are you?

HENRY
: A hotel.

MUM
(
speaking in background
): What happened to the flat?

DAD
: What happened to the flat?