Lily and the Lost Boy (3 page)

“It's the main dish that's hard,” their mother said.

Mr. Corey walked in through the back door.

“I've finally solved that problem,” he said. “I've built a barbecue pit.”

They all went to look. Beneath the washing line, which stretched from a branch of the mulberry tree to a wooden post, Mr. Corey had dug a hole. He'd surrounded it with stones and laid a wire mesh across it. Inside the hole were twigs and tight rolls of newspaper.

“And I bought hamburger. At least I think that's what it is,” he said. “It took me two hours and five hundred grammar mistakes to get the mesh. I think in one shop I asked for a bale of hay, but Mr. Kalligas came along and rescued me.”

“We'll be able to grill fish and chicken,” Mrs. Corey said. “Wonderful! Only now I'll have to learn the names of fish.”

“We must learn everything well,” Mr. Corey said.

Paul made a gargoyle face at Lily.

“If a fly goes by, your face will stick that way,” their father observed.

“Lily, take in your clothes. They're dry.” Mrs. Corey pointed to the washline. Hanging next to Lily's cotton skirt and blouse on the line was the octopus Paul had caught that morning, fishing from the breakwater in the harbor. When it was completely dried out by the sun, you could eat it. Like goat's milk, it was a thing Lily didn't care for.

She took her clothes to her room and stood for a moment at her window. The fire was burning brightly beneath the mesh. Darkness was spreading over the vast sky, coming, Lily imagined, from a huge smoke pot somewhere in Turkey. And the sea was the color of dark wine, just as Homer had described it in
The Odyssey
. The flames leaped, then subsided. She looked at the faces of her brother and mother and father. They were smiling, their expressions expectant as they looked down at the meat Mr. Corey had placed on the mesh. Her family! She thought she would always remember how they looked at that moment.

There was movement along the top of the wall. Many of their neighbors, including Stella, were lined up along it, gazing down at them in amusement. Stella said something and everyone laughed.

When the meat was cooked and put on a plate, the neighbors all waved at the Coreys, wished them a good dinner, and went away. At the kitchen table Mr. Corey said, “They were laughing because only barbarians would cook meat outdoors.”

“They weren't laughing meanly. They don't do that,” Mrs. Corey said.

“Perhaps not, but they must think us strange,” said Mr. Corey.

Lily had nearly forgotten the taste of hamburgers. In the coming winter, when they were gathered around the table at home for supper, far from the honeyed air of Thasos, they might be eating hamburgers, speaking about this very moment. Thinking of that time in the future, she felt a touch of dizziness.

“No ketchup,” complained Paul.

“No piccalilli,” their mother said.

“Piccalilli is an Indian condiment,” observed their father.

“You're always teaching, Papa,” said Lily.

“Not when I eat strawberries,” Mr. Corey said.

“What would happen if you couldn't remember anything?” Lily asked pensively. They all looked at her.

“I can't think of much worse than that,” Mrs. Corey said.

“You wouldn't be able to learn—or teach,” said Mr. Corey.

“But you wouldn't be afraid of going to the acropolis, Lily,” Paul said, “because you'd forget about the vipers.”

“I'd forget about the acropolis, too,” Lily remarked.

After Paul had washed the dishes in hot water Mrs. Corey heated on the stove, and Lily had dried them and put them away on a shelf, Lily went to the balcony. She sat down in one of the two canvas chairs and looked out at the night. Moonlight silvered the brush and trees. In the Temple of Poseidon goats and chickens would be asleep now. The fishing fleet, its lights twinkling, was far out on the water. A distant murmur rose from the long row of stone buildings that were called the fishermen's houses, though not everyone who lived in them was a fisherman. Amber lights, glowing along the wharf and in front of tavernas, pulsed like little heartbeats, the heartbeats of rabbits throbbing away inside the dark. When the moon was full, its radiance dimmed all other light and picked out as though with silver ink every broken column, the stones of the breakwater, the huddled shapes of houses. Tonight thin splinters of black clouds drifted across the sky. The island of Thasopoula glittered like a tangled string of black beads.

Lily had read about Thasus in her book of myths. He was the grandson of Poseidon and was said to be the first colonizer of Thasos. Perhaps, she thought, his spirit lived on in that tiny island, watching Limena as it changed over thousands of years from a city of eighty thousand people to a small village, itself only the topmost layer of many layers of settlements going all the way down to that great city.

Often the Coreys went to swim from the rocks on the other side of the village. To reach them, they crossed a high, narrow embankment beyond the fishermen's houses. From the embankment Lily had looked down thirty feet or so to part of the ancient city and seen marble streets, the walls of stores, and ceremonial arches, some still half-hidden by the earth that had piled up over centuries. When she looked back to the path they were on, she saw small white houses, their gardens, a single street lamp at the end of the embankment, and once the yogurt boy's bicycle leaning against a wall—everything that was of this moment perched on the edge of the past.

Her father had turned on their small battery radio in the kitchen, and Lily heard the high wail of Turkish music. Sometimes her father tried to find an English-speaking station to hear news, though he was less interested in it than when they'd first arrived on the island.

Paul came out on the balcony and sprawled in the other chair.

“They're going for a walk soon,” he reported. “I hope they don't stay out late.”

She and Paul often went out at night but only for a short while, staying pretty close to the house. The idea of going all the way to the Gate of Herakles worried her.

A donkey brayed somewhere in the hills behind the village. Another donkey answered it from closer by. Paul began to sing in a whining voice, imitating the Turkish song.

“I don't see why we couldn't meet him in the daytime,” Lily said.

“It's better at night,” Paul said. She had a sudden vision of herself in front of their house in Williamstown. She and some friends were shouting and running in the street, in and out of pools of light cast by street lamps. To shout wildly and laugh, to run, were things you wanted to do on a summer night when the grown-ups let go of you for a while, and familiar things were in shadow.

“They might look for us later and be worried if we're not here,” she said.

“They never wake up,” he said. “Even when we've dropped things in the kitchen.”

“I still don't see—” she began. But Paul brayed like a donkey and pulled her from the chair and pushed her into her room. The radio was off, and Lily, hearing the gate clang, knew her parents had gone for their evening stroll.

She and Paul sat on the floor and played cards. There were only two tables in the house, one in the kitchen and one in the room where Mr. Corey worked. Lily had grown to like the bareness of the rooms.

Paul won every rummy game. She didn't mind. At home her face would have turned red, and she would have been furious. He would have jeered and danced around her, holding up his hand like the champion. It was part of the difference of the way they were with each other here.

“Time for bed, children,” Mr. Corey said from the doorway.

They had to brush their teeth at the kitchen sink. Once Lily had discovered three huge slugs the color of bruises clumped around the drain. They had come through the kitchen window. She had seen their slimy trails in the morning through the grass. The Coreys took baths in the kitchen, too—sponge baths, their mother called them—with hot water heated on the stove. Their house had an inside toilet of sorts, unlike many of the village houses. It was in a narrow room with a high window. You flushed it by pouring in a jug of water. They had found a dozen large terra-cotta jugs in the musty cellar.

Lily got into bed and took up her book. She had started to read about the Minotaur and Ariadne and Theseus. The murmur of her parents' voices came from the balcony, comforting like the babble of a stream. Suddenly Mrs. Corey's voice rose. “It does worry me,” she said. “Not for Lily. She'll catch up. But Paul was close to failing math. Missing those months of school—” Her voice dropped.

Lily couldn't hear her father's reply. She could guess what he'd say. Even though he talked so much about the importance of school, he would declare that living here was the chance of a lifetime. “It is a golden place,” he'd told Lily once. Someone else had said that, the only other American she had met on Thasos besides Jack Hemmings.

He had been a tall, skinny man, like a scarecrow in his crisp summer suit, his skin dry and brown as a paper bag. He'd been standing in front of the museum looking down the path to a huge stone statue of a youth with a ram slung around his shoulders. As she walked by, he turned and stared at her.

“I can tell by your long yellow braid that you're an American,” he'd said in English.

She'd said she could be Finnish.

“Aha! Not with that accent,” he'd replied.

He told her he worked for an American company in Istanbul, and always came to Thasos for his leave. “It's a golden island—Eden,” he said.

“Except for vipers,” Lily remarked.

“Oh, but there was a snake in Eden, too. So you see, it
is
perfect. For the moment, at least.”

The book fell from her hand. She yawned and leaned over the edge of the bed to turn off the small shadeless lamp on the floor. She sank gently into sleep, sinking down through all the villages to a great marble city, and waking, in her dream, in another time.

Then Paul was shaking her foot, whispering, “Lily! Wake up! Let's go!”

It was hard to get out of bed, but his words gave her energy. At home he wouldn't have said, “Let's go.” He would have said, “Take off! I'm busy.”

She pulled on a T-shirt and slacks and slipped into her sandals. They went out the kitchen door, Lily shuddering at the thought of stepping on a slug, and around the house to the gate. Paul opened it carefully so as to not make any noise. Lily heard the public faucet dripping as they passed it on their way down to the center of the village.

When they came to the shrine of Dionysus, where the path became a street, she saw that her father had left their garbage there, as he did once a week, wrapped in a sheet of the Kavalla newspaper in front of the steps.

THREE

“Who takes the garbage away?” Lily had asked Stella, who was the one who had told them to leave theirs at the shrine.

“Someone comes at night,” Stella replied vaguely.

The Coreys were the only family in their part of the village who had garbage to leave. Tonight a donkey was tethered close to the broad steps of the shrine and appeared to be staring down hopefully at the small package of empty milk cans. But when Lily was a few feet from the animal, she saw that its eyes were closed. The donkey's owner might be at Giorgi's taverna. When he came to collect it, he would take the cans too. The Greeks, Lily noticed, saved every piece of the slippery paper their meat and groceries were wrapped in and every piece of the string that secured the wrapping. Empty cans, she thought, must be especially valuable.

They passed the police station. A light glowed in one large window, and through it she saw the handsome policeman who always bowed so deeply to the Coreys when he met them. He was wearing dark glasses as usual and reading a newspaper.

Ahead of them was a long lane, parallel to the waterfront, leading to the main square. In front of all of the houses were pots of flowers, their colors deepened and darkened by the streetlights. A lean orange cat appeared suddenly from some hole, slunk along a few feet, and vanished. And at that moment the children heard the mandolin-like notes of a bouzouki, which fell into the late night hush like pebbles striking tin. Lily knew it was Dimitrious, the barber, playing in the taverna on the quay.

The Coreys had watched men dance to that strange music. They formed a circle, their arms around each other's waists. One or two would dance alone, their hands high in the air, clapping, sweat pouring down their faces. Mr. Kalligas urged Mr. Corey to join the circling men one night. The Greeks had clapped their hands and shouted encouragement, but Mr. Corey, shaking his head and smiling, had come up with the word
shy
, which amused everyone so much they forgot about persuading him to dance.

“What a triumph!” he had said later. “The only time I've used the right word at the right time.” Mr. Kalligas had told them that same night about a foreigner, an American who lived in Panagia. “No one like him much but he is greatest dancer,” Mr. Kalligas had said.

“Do you think Mr. Kalligas was talking about Jack's father that time?” Lily asked Paul. But he was already turning down the street that would lead them east out of the village. She ran to catch up with him.

They passed the last streetlight. From there on the houses had no electricity, only oil lamps. She meant to ask him her question again, but she couldn't see his face. She felt a touch of fear as though she were alone on the dark road.

They came to a crossroads. One led up the great mountain to Panagia; another curved out of sight around a hill and led to a beach where they sometimes went to swim. Still a third led off to the western side of the mountain, where Lily had seen flocks of sheep grazing. From a distance they had looked like grains of rice scattered amid the sloping meadows.

The last village house stood by the crossroads. It was both a farm and a café. The Coreys had stopped there for cold lemonade on their way home from the beach. It was served to them by the young farmwife at one of three rickety tables in a yard beneath plane trees. Chickens scratched around their feet, and once a black goat no bigger than a puppy had leaped on their table and butted them with its hard little curly head.