Читать книгу White Vespa - Kevin Oderman - Страница 21

Thirteen

17 June

Myles got off the Vespa at the foot of the Katarráktes, the less trafficked steps between Yialós and Chorió. The summer before, it had taken him some poking around to find where the steps started up, though the ascending ramp of the stairs is visible from most of town. Unlike the Kalí Stráta, the Katarráktes is not closed in by houses, but angles up a hillside out in the open. Myles rarely saw a tourist there; the stairs led to a quiet neighborhood of modest houses and if there were tavernas or bars or anything else a tourist was likely to walk to up there, Myles had never seen them. Of course, there were a few dedicated walkers, and occasionally Myles met one of them coming down as he was going up. But they tended to be good sorts and Myles didn’t mind seeing them there. He walked up the Katarráktes often, preferring to make a loop rather than take the Kalí Stráta coming and going. Besides, the walk across Chorió, high on the hill over the harbor, was one of his favorites, and he made it often with camera in hand. He loved the startling views of the harbor below, seen between houses, through doorways, and over rooftops. The interest of the shots varied day to day, sometimes hour by hour, as the boats, looking like toys from high up, arranged and rearranged themselves, tying up and casting off.

He liked early mornings and late evenings best, when the light softened, and when the big tour boats were gone. The big boats struck him as out of scale in the small harbor. Sometimes the light had a pearly quality, a wonderful milkiness, which he tried to capture on film, his camera steadied on his walking stick. He hadn’t gotten the shots he wanted, which was one of the reasons he kept going back. The shots were more difficult than they looked, but felt necessary, not only for The Lesser Dodecanese, but to Myles personally. He couldn’t have explained exactly why, but he knew it had to do with a woman he’d seen up there the summer before. He always remembered her at the same spot on the cobbled path, just where it passed over a breezeway between two small houses, now apparently occupied by a single family. He had been looking through the slot, at the brightness of the water behind that seemed to darken the slate walk between the two buildings, which was in shadow, visible under a flowering vine. He’d been looking very intently, when a woman, a naked woman, flew from one building to the other, from right to left. She’d been mid-leap all the way across, or so it had seemed, arms raised, one knee up before her and the other leg, propelling her, taut out behind, head up, small breasts riding up, dark hair trailing. There had been no sound, no giggle or slap of footsteps.

Swift, unexpected, and then gone. Myles knew the way it had happened had a great deal to do with how vividly he remembered the running woman. He’d noticed the pattern at other times: a deer bounding across a gap in the woods, a bird crossing a narrow window. They were like photographs, moments broken free of whatever it was that was going on. And they lodged in memory with a vividness altogether out of keeping with any reasonable explanation of their importance.

Myles stopped just there, every time he walked that path, peered under the vine that was flowering this year, too, but without any expectation of seeing the woman again. That, he was pretty sure, wouldn’t happen. Some things properly happen only once. Myles didn’t talk about the once that it had happened, either. He knew telling it would elicit a leer, or at least the suspicion that the moment had mattered because it was erotic. But it hadn’t been erotic; the only word he could put to it was otherworldly, and that wasn’t a word he liked to use in conversation.

After awhile he walked on. Just short of the Kalí Stráta he turned right, exploring the narrow alleys of residential Chorió, where the cries of mothers and children echoed raucously off the whitewashed stone walls. He was a little lost, lost in detail, but knew he would run onto the Kalí Stráta in the end. He crossed another alley and, looking down the narrowing perspective, saw two girls swinging badminton rackets, screeching. He recognized Váso from To Stenáki when she turned and charged toward him. Then, as suddenly, she turned around, put her racket to the ground, and lobbed something back toward the other girl: not a shuttlecock. Myles looked closely. It was a small rat. They were playing badminton with a rat they’d trapped in the alley! Then he heard it, screeching in a higher register than the girls. He shook his head, considering the possibilities: badrat and ratminton. But then the rat got by the other girl and raced into an overgrown lot, making a getaway at last. The girls howled and then fell to giggling wildly. It was a better game than badminton, apparently. Myles waved to Váso and she came over, sputtering in Greek, her eyes shining madly in her flushed face.