Lives in Ruins (19 page)

Connelly would do almost anything for Yeronisos. During a week in which she and her crew excavated on six of the seven days, she also delivered four separate lectures to outside groups (among them the European Union, on the subject of ecological partnerships with local communities); threw her annual party to thank a hundred or so locals; and hosted numerous guests, including Richard Wiese and his camera crew from
Born to Explore
, four visiting high school students, including her nephew, and me. She did all this short-handed, after two graduate assistants had been called home on family emergencies. Connelly had just celebrated her fifty-eighth birthday, and though she wore her years lightly and had the build of an athlete, I wouldn't have believed her stamina if I hadn't been a witness. Every day, the woman hurled herself off a metaphorical cliff and swam through choppy water with tools in her teeth, then donned a fancy outfit and charmed her way around both humble and influential circles. She got little sleep. Sleep? She ran on adrenaline.

The first day, I knelt by my assigned trench as Connelly leaned in to demonstrate the art and skill of excavating, close enough to
reveal a thin layer of foundation on her face, a nod to the network cameras. “Make a two-centimeter pass, then go back to the beginning,” she directed. “The rule is, you always remove the most recently deposited layer and think about it. If you see something blue-green, it could be bronze—that's what it looks like when it ages. Iridescence? That could be glass. We have found lots of ancient glass here.” She peered up to make sure I had been following her. “You're in deep trouble if I start seeing fresh breaks. The edges of the pottery you find should be dirty.” She was interrupted by an undergraduate who thought he had found a coin, but it was clear to Connelly that it was a fractured piece of bedrock. “It is the right size, but not the right weight,” she explained to the student. “When in doubt, ask,” she said and sent him back to his trench.

“We backfill much of this each year,” she told me, which is to say, they carefully refilled the trenches they dug with the excavated dirt, to protect the walls and other features they uncover. “I'd replace this dirt at the end of the season, and I'd think, ‘I know you, hairy blue earth! I know you, purple-y earth!'” I could only imagine what hairy blue earth looked like, but Connelly spoke the poetry of excavation. “An archaeologist has to be like an earth-whisperer,” she said.

I started my study of the baked earth side by side with her students, using hand picks to loosen the topsoil; then we took our trowels and, with a chopping motion, broke up the dirt, our eyes sharp for anything—a bit of pottery, a glint of glass, a land snail (we were also collecting land snails for a scientist). There were plastic bags at the top of each trench to organize the finds. I was slower than all my trench mates, who were digging in sleeveless shirts and seemed to thrive in the scorching Mediterranean sun, while my face turned red and my hair bushy. Later in the afternoon, Connelly went through my little pile. “This is pottery, a part of a roofing tile,” she told me. “This is a Chalcolithic shard. My students call it a Chalcolithic biscuit. Good!” The rest—mere rocks.

Each afternoon, we repeated the complicated boat drill in reverse and then the action shifted to the apotheke, the picturesque headquarters on the bluff opposite Yeronisos—essentially a huge storeroom and offices with a plaza, thatched and covered by grapevines. There artifacts were washed and logged, a late, hearty lunch was served, and Connelly lectured on pottery, or a visitor shared some research from his thesis. Then the students went for a quick swim in the Mediterranean or a run in the late-afternoon heat, though, as Connelly fretted, “It takes three days to recover from dehydration!”

At eight at night, we gathered on the patio of a restaurant half a mile from the apotheke to eat french fries and Cypriot dishes with pork pieces, or plain pasta with tomato sauce (that one went quickly), or the lovely vanishing lettuce salads. Complaints about the food made Connelly bristle; this was what the Cypriots ate, and when in Cyprus . . . She had eaten this food herself for more than twenty years, but her doctor had recently put her on a low-carbohydrate diet. So she got a simple plate of grilled chicken and fresh steamed vegetables—and looked weary when anyone pointed at her plate and said, “Can I have that instead?” She wanted to talk about the excavation, about Cyprus, about the European Union, about what to do for her colleague Paul's birthday the next day, about our
souls
. Anything but fuss over the daily menu, hers or ours.

One night I wrapped a piece of bread in a napkin and slipped it in my purse. Nothing was open in town when we took off each morning, there were no stores, and I had run out of protein bars. “Are you sneaking bread?” Connelly asked. Caught red-handed! I laughed and told her, “No, I am forgoing the pleasure of eating this bread until later,” and the moment passed. (Indeed, though I had expected to be on my own for most evening meals, Connelly had invited me to dine with the group every night.) I did regret my bad manners, taking that bread. Writers are hungry. Archaeologists are hungrier. Underlying their hunger is the tough economics of
practicing the slow work of archaeology in a world that demands speedy returns. I learned this lesson regularly, about how close to the bone archaeologists live, and how much it cost them simply to do their jobs. For instance, Coca-Cola Hellenic Bottling Company donated soda and bottled water to the Yeronisos dig, and one night the team forgot to bring that evening's allotment to the restaurant. Connelly sent someone back to fetch it. She had negotiated a price for their dinners that didn't include beverages, and “two euros here, five euros there—our budget is simply too tight to squander that money when we already have the drinks.” But then she decanted it all into picturesque pitchers—thrift, served with grace notes.

Connelly's solution for the celebration of her colleague Paul Croft's birthday was ingenious: she ordered a bundt cake from the restaurant, and instructed the cook to stuff it with Nutella. The neatly baked cake, collected before dawn, transported in a snug plastic container and passed hand to hand via two boats, over the rocks, and up the crumbling stairs, was festooned with little cocktail flags instead of candles and cut with gleeful ceremony after breakfast.

Croft, the burly expat archaeologist from Cambridge University, “who does all things well” in Connelly's view, wore a keffiyeh and a Las Vegas T-shirt. I asked him how he liked Vegas, and he looked surprised. I pointed at the shirt and he pulled it away from his chest. “You mean this? It's whatever was in the bin at the used clothing shop.” Of course, I realized; this man who lives on nothing in Cyprus doesn't goof off in Las Vegas. He was someone who uncovered a wall, and said, “Now we have the responsibility to conserve it,” then he mixed up some mud and straw and plastered the wall with care. He repaired the ancient stairs and improvised a landing. All of them, they make do, and, like most archaeologists of good faith these days, they leave part of each excavation untouched for the people who will follow them, with greater knowledge, superior tools, and maybe more funds.

What made this classic archaeology dig different from, say, a dig on a sugar plantation in the Caribbean? For one thing, Connelly stood over our trench chatting about Apollo, Cleopatra, and Homer, as though they were old friends. On the boat leaving the island, Valentinos led the students in a goofy Greek chant that sounded like
Emena me lene pagoto!
(“My name is ice cream”). Talia, Connelly's graduate assistant, told those of us huddled in the stern the story of Menelaus dragging Helen by the hair. We were mesmerized. “Have you written about this?” someone asked, and Talia admitted that she had written a thesis on that very topic, titled “From Beauty to Booty.” Hilarity in the boat. Paige, a theater major, said, “I can show you how to drag someone by the hair onstage,” and when we disembarked and shed our life preservers, she pulled one young woman aside and demonstrated. “See? I hold my hair in a bunch at the top and you grab my collar. I wheel away, screaming, ‘No, no!'”

I was right on top of them, and I swore it looked real.

THE APOTHEKE WAS
bustling the Saturday afternoon of the party, with ten toned and tawny NYU students toiling to hang outdoor lights and trim shrubbery and, with candles and sand, turn all those paper lunch bags I'd brought into lanterns. The students had each paid handsomely for the five-week dig
^*
and like students in any field school, were expected to sweat and suffer, haul buckets of dirt, and scrub pieces of broken pottery with old toothbrushes. But these students had also been called upon to stage an elaborate party for the local Cypriot community and perform for the attendees. After their yard work, trimming the bushes and hanging the lights, they set up the lanterns—“Not that high up the hill!” Connelly called—then practiced a native folk dance and a local song
in Greek. Squeezing in another day of excavation on Yeronisos cut into party preparation time, but our leader couldn't resist the combination of placid seas and sunny days to seize the opportunity, and now things felt a little frantic. This was a planned invasion—Connelly and her team were eager to connect with the locals and celebrate Cyprus's past and present—but nevertheless, a hundred people were dropping by soon and we weren't ready.

I looked around at the unswept terrace and grabbed a broom. Nothing made me happier than to pitch in as part of Connelly's team, and sweeping was something I knew how to do.

“Now we'll set up the photo,” she directed, and we all trooped to the bluff where the piano had been rolled out. It was a stage set out of a colonial past, an effort to re-create the glamour of the great era of exploration, though this project and the party to celebrate it were the opposite of colonial. Connelly stood at her tripod with the expedition camera and composed the shot: one of the two handsome young male students was designated the “wounded warrior” and stretched out, head propped on his arm, in the foreground. Talia sat in the slingback chair. Connelly's two colleagues, Paul Croft and Richard Anderson, stood attentively beside the piano, and Connelly's nephew and a local twelve-year-old, Andreas, a performer who taught the students their dance moves, crouched at the foot of the bench where Connelly would sit. I stood beside two of my trench mates, Yeronisos over my left shoulder. We would return to these spots in our party clothes for the official shot.

Everyone scattered to the two rental houses that served as dorms to dress up and hurry back to finish the photo session. Connelly was teaching us how to race from dirty dig and sweaty cleanup to sparkling party in twenty minutes flat. “The extremes! I love the extremes,” she exulted as we swapped boots for heels. “What I hate is the boring middle!”

Richard Anderson, an architect by training with a permanent sunburn who could talk knowledgeably about any subject, especially
Byzantine churches, walls, and ruins, had changed into a jaunty plaid jacket and looked as if he had been born to host the steady stream of guests: the wealthy residents of Cyprus, the American ambassador and his family, Baroness Betty Boothroyd (the first and only female speaker of the British House of Commons), Valentinos the fisherman, a masseuse, an elderly local woman who read the future in coffee grounds, the tanned ABC film crew with fashionable stubbled cheeks, and a coterie of monks. Connelly, in pale peach silk and vertiginous heels, swirled around the patio in generous welcome. Everything looked stunning in the soft night air, the lobster lights twinkling above the arbor, the gorgeous ruin of Yeronisos in the background.

I chatted with the bearded and black-robed monks, who showed me how to eat the grilled
haloumi
cheese with my fingers. Connelly swung by and said, “You monks are the greatest!” The students' transformation from grubby diggers to groomed and gracious American hosts was impressive, and they smiled and laughed throughout their spirited folk dance. Connelly, dancing later with one of the guests, twirled expertly on those tippy heels and lifted her arms to snap her fingers. I remembered her telling me about falling one icy night on the Upper East Side of New York while wearing little Italian boots, shattering her ankle. She did physical therapy diligently for a year. “I did not want to be a limping old lady on Yeronisos!”

I left, changed into sneakers behind the apotheke and walked back to my apartment on the midnight-dark road with the aid of a tiny flashlight. The party, I heard, went on for hours. Most of us took Sunday off to recover, but Connelly and her nephew spent the day on a boat with Boothroyd and some prominent Cypriots, cruising the sea. Just thinking about that made me ill. I went swimming in the Mediterranean with Talia, who had to save me only once.

MY TRENCH MATES
were clever students, good sports, and good company through the long hot hours. They liked to play a guessing
game, where one thought of the name of a person they all knew, and the rest peppered her with questions: If X were a kind of makeup, what kind would X be? If X were a type of chair, style of music, archaeological tool, etc. Their wordplay amused me. If one dubious subject were cheese, they were told, he'd be “fake cheese”; if coffee, “instant coffee.” They guessed immediately who it was. They were stumped by another, though. “Okay, if he were a George Marshall Peters accomplishment, what would he be?” one asked. They all laughed. I thought they were referring to an explorer, but no, it seemed George Marshall Peters was a former student on the dig whose accomplishments were legendary. He did everything, from finding significant artifacts to illustrating them with talent. He had even decorated the dig house.

Not an hour later, when we took our break for breakfast, Connelly, as if she had heard the guessing game, mentioned George Marshall Peters, and the students swallowed their giggles. But what she said quickly sobered them. The little foghorn that Peters had donated years ago to the dig, the one used every day to summon us from the far corners of Yeronisos for breaks or the end of the day or emergencies, had been stolen.