Cambridge (22 page)

There were the remnants of marble stairs, but mostly underfoot was rubble and dirt. Stunted, dry vegetation had attracted some dusty goats. We passed an antique man with a box camera on a wooden tripod, napping on his stool. In the clear, dry air we could hear snatches of German floating down from above us.

“Why are there always Germans?” I asked.

“Germans are mad for Greece,” my father said. “Just like the English. But right now, the Germans can afford to come and the English can’t.”

It was too hot to ask why the Germans but not the English could afford to come.

We kept trudging upward.

It’s in the nature of a steep-sided outcropping that the top isn’t visible from the approaches, and for much of the climb I was too hot to look around or to look forward to where we were going. My father was a few steps ahead. His shirt was soaked, stretched wet across his back. A sudden gray-green lizard froze near my foot, looking up at me. We exchanged glances, then he vanished into a rock.

We reached the top.

A moment when the world unfolds: few of those, in life. Everything peeled back. I could hear it rolling away. This was the skeleton of humanity I was seeing, this colonnaded marble spine. And after the hiss of the shivering unrolling there was silence. It was an uncanny silence, indifferent and detached. Thousands of years of quiet floated in the hot, bright air.

We stood in the shadow of the Parthenon’s broken pediment, between the columns where the sun had not yet heated the stone. My father raised his arm and pointed west.

“The plain of Attica,” he said.

So this is reality, I thought. It’s hot and bare and permanent, it’s broken and chipped and huge, it will last forever, even in ruins, it will make you speechless.

We stood there for a while, until the sun invaded our recessed shade. Thick, black shimmering shadows made a Parthenon on the floor. We walked around the rim of the temple through these shadows and the light in between them. The difference in temperature was as sharp as a sound, as if we were walking on the black and white keys of a vast piano made of marble and daylight.

My father stopped again to point to a small building below.

“That’s the Erechtheion,” he said. “Look, look at the pillars.”

“They’re girls!” It was a relief to see something on a human scale, with a human face. Six girls standing on the edge of a temple, just as we were.

“Let’s go down there,” my father said.

It was a scramble. The way was littered with chunks and bits, sometimes fallen so I could see that this had been a column. Now it was a horizontal, dismantled column. Mostly, though, there were hunks and blocks of stone lying around in disarray.

“How come it’s such a mess up here?” I asked. “It looks like it got blown up.”

“It did,” he said. “The Turks were using the Parthenon to store their ammunition in, and the Venetians attacked it. So the whole thing blew up.”

“When was that?”

“About three hundred years ago,” my father said. “Until then, it looked the same way it had when it was built.”

“That’s crazy! Why would the Turks put their ammunition in there?”

My father shook his head. “Well, it was big, and nobody was
doing anything else with it.” Then he said, “They didn’t think much of the Greeks.”

“And the Greeks let them do that?”

“They didn’t have any choice. The Turks owned Greece. It was part of their empire. And the Venetians were at war with the Turks. That’s how it happened.” He walked on a little bit. “Let’s not think about it right now. All of that is sad.”

My father rarely used the word
sad
.

From where we were, below it, the Parthenon was anything but sad. It was splendid. There was nothing to say about it, that’s how wonderful it was to stand and look at it. As we picked our way over to the stone girls on their parapet, I wondered about what my father thought was so sad.

He must have meant the wrecking of the temple: For two thousand years it had been fine and then, boom, it was shattered. But it wasn’t completely gone, and it looked correct anyhow. It looked just right to me. Whoever built it had planned it so well that it didn’t matter if half of it got blown up, because it was perfect and so whatever was left was perfect too.

“Now these are the caryatids,” my father said to me. “These girls.” He seemed halfhearted about giving instruction, which was fine with me. He hadn’t opened the guidebook since we’d started our walk up the Acropolis.

“I know that,” I said. And I did know that, though I hadn’t quite put it together that these statues were those caryatids. Seeing them in a picture was one thing; being with them was something so different as to have made me forget that I knew them already, sort of.

We looked up at them. They looked out over our heads, the way they’d been looking out for thousands of years. A couple of them had a tiny bit of a smile, more the idea of a smile than the real thing.

The day was getting hotter and there wasn’t any shelter out in the rubble. Even though it didn’t have a roof, the Parthenon had been better—all those long shadows to duck into. Also, the girls, in the end, were as disengaged and impassive as everything else. I’d been misled by their faces, by the fact that they had faces. I thought that would make them comforting because they would be like me in some way. They weren’t. They weren’t like anything except themselves. Nothing on the Acropolis was like anything anywhere else. That was what made all of it stark and immobile and unyielding and unbearable.

That’s what it was: unbearable.

“It’s getting a bit hot,” my father said.

It must have been over 100 degrees.

“Let’s go to the museum,” he said. “They put a lot of the Parthenon sculptures in there to preserve them.”

“In case somebody else tries to blow them up?” I asked.

He didn’t laugh. “Things were eroding from pollution and weather. And people stole a lot of them. Like Lord Elgin. Do you remember the Elgin Marbles in London?”

I didn’t.

“We saw them,” he persisted. “Magnificent horses. You don’t remember them?”

“I don’t see how you could steal things this big,” I said. “Even the broken things are huge.”

“You get a crane and a crew. It takes a lot of organization.”

“But why didn’t the Greeks stop them? Why did they let people come here and steal stuff and blow it up? Could we just come here with a crane and take away a caryatid?”

“Not anymore,” my father said. “But when you could, people did. It’s because the Greeks were always part of some bigger empire, so they weren’t strong enough to look out for their own interests. But, you know, this isn’t the only country that got
looted by empire builders. Napoleon took half of Egypt back to Paris. The Romans started it. They’d take obelisks and whatnot from cities they’d conquered and set them up around Rome.”

“Bragging,” I said.

“Exactly. And the early archaeologists, in the nineteenth century, took just as much as the Romans ever had. Nobody had the idea that an ancient site ought to be left intact, that it was more meaningful that way. Everything was a trophy.”

“Where’s the museum?” I asked. I was feeling woozy from the heat, and I wanted to interrupt my father’s archaeology lecture.

“Of course,” he went on, “it is wonderful to be able to go to the British Museum and see that winged lion from Nimrud—”

“Daddy,” I said, “where is this museum up here?”

“Oh.” He stopped and looked around. “It’s over this way,” he said. He didn’t sound convinced, but he strode off, looking purposeful.

I followed. My parents often argued about where they were heading. My father did not have a good sense of direction, but he was determined and forceful, which meant we could go quite a ways into nowhere before he would agree that he’d been wrong. I was glad that didn’t happen this time. Two hours outside was enough.

The museum was cool and dimly lit. The polished marble floor gleamed as if it were water, a refreshing effect. There was a tempting bench at the entry, but my father ignored it. “Elgin missed some friezes,” he said, “and I want to see them. They’re in here.” He barreled on in.

I was more interested in the statues. Grownups liked basrelief, I’d noticed. I didn’t like it at all. It made me feel itchy and unsatisfied, whereas they—even A.A., whom I thought of as a better sort of grownup—would stand and Oooh at it for much too long. I wondered what they saw and why I didn’t see it.

My father established himself in front of a long wall of friezes. I took a look and felt my usual urge to get away. Part of what I didn’t like was that it was too busy, as if the sculptor felt he had to make up in surface activity what was missing in depth. These reliefs were blurry and blunted. I could see why they’d been put inside. Some parts looked as if they’d been sandblasted almost flat.

I left my father and went to see the many large figures that stood on plinths around the room. There were lots of stiff young women who looked like cousins of the caryatids, except their drapery was unrealistic and their smiles were more realistic. Still, something about their expressions was peculiar. Like the caryatids, they were staring out into oblivion in a way that said: I am ignoring you. They seemed happier about it than the caryatids were, though. There was a wonderful man with a little calf slung across the back of his neck. Both of them were smiling in that unfocused way. The man looked Egyptian to me. Maybe it was his stance, which was the same as the Egyptian gods in the long hallway at the museum in Boston: one foot forward, but both legs still embedded in stone, as if the figure were being born out of the marble, or trapped inside it.

Beside the man with the calf was a boy, standing straight with both arms by his sides. He too had one foot forward, but his legs were free. He’d escaped from the stone. He had a kind of Egyptian hairdo. Long, tight curls made a triangular frame around his face that reminded me of a pharaoh’s headdress. And, like almost all the statues there, he had a half-smile that was benign yet chilling in some way.

I leaned closer to read his caption.
KOUROS
, it said.

Leaning, I felt a wave of buzzing. First a light, fuzzy feeling, then an effervescent spinning, then a deep, thick blackness that swooped over me. And then, nothing.

Nothing and nothing. A half-smile floating. A smooth, clean shiny pillow for my head.

I was lying on the marble floor. I was still buzzing, but not as loudly, and a number of faces were hanging above me, saying, “Water,” and
“Wasser,”
and
“Nero, nero”
—Greek for water, one of the few words I knew.

My father was cradling my head so I could drink from the cup held by a small old woman in black. She was talking excitedly in Greek. A German said, “It’s too hot for a child today.” One of my ears felt very sore.

People helped me to stand.

“Are you okay?” my father asked. “You can stand, right?”

I nodded. I looked down at where I’d fallen and saw a few drops of blood, maybe five or six.

“I cut my ear,” I said. It was scratched and still bleeding, inside, in the shell. “On him,” I added, pointing.

The
kouros
kept smiling. It must have been his toe, on the foot that was forward. I must have scraped into it on my way down.

The old woman put the hem of her black skirt into the cup of water and cleaned the blood off my ear with it. Then she patted me on the shoulder and said something to me with a big smile.

The German who had objected to my being out in the heat translated: “She is saying the gods love you,” he said.

My father looked displeased with that idea and with all the fuss. “All right,” he said. “I think we’d better go home now.”

“Why?” I asked the German. “Can you ask her why she says that?”

The German asked her, but she didn’t answer.

Another German came over with a present for me: his newspaper, which he’d folded into a hat. “This is for the prevention of sunlight,” he said.

My father thanked him in German, and they had a stuttery-sounding conversation for a few minutes. The first German joined in. Now that he saw my father could speak German, he was less disapproving. The three of them chatted while I stood still, holding my new hat and feeling around inside my ear. I kept my back to the
kouros
. I didn’t want to look at him. I wasn’t exactly afraid of him, but I felt it was better to avoid his enchantment—the whatever-it-was he’d exerted over me that had made me fall down.

The old woman in black had retreated to a three-legged stool in the corner near the friezes; she must have been a museum guard. As my father and the Germans began to conclude their conversation, she scuttled over to me again. She had an apricot she wanted me to take.

My father shook his head in the Greek manner, jerking it up and saying,
“Oxi, oxi.”
“Thank you,” he added, but he didn’t look very grateful.

She jabbed her hand at me and said something insistent.

“From her own garden,” one of the Germans explained.

“Fine,” said my father. He put his hand on my shoulder. “We’d better get you home for a rest.”

Going down was easier, and the paper hat helped more than I’d thought it would. My father walked beside me, pausing a few times to ask me—to tell me, really—“You’re okay, right?” And I was. I held on to the apricot, though I wasn’t sure I wanted to eat it. It made me nervous, as if it might be part of the Acropolis spell.

“What does
kouros
mean?” I asked my father.

“Young man,” he said. “A beautiful young man.”

Then he said, “You’d better not eat that apricot.”

“Why?”

“Fruit isn’t safe,” he said.

“We eat fruit all the time,” I said.

“We eat oranges. You peel oranges. We don’t eat fruit you can’t peel, especially if you can’t wash it.”

“Why not?”

“You could get the runs,” he said.

We walked on a little. “Those Germans were classics professors from Tübingen,” he told me. “They were actually quite nice. We’re going to have lunch with them in Kifissia someday soon.”

We passed the photographer with his box camera. The trip was over. My father decided we should take a taxi home and walked off to the corner, where several Mercedes-Benzes idled in a diesel haze.