Pascali's Island

'He says he must have one,' I said.

'Olur,' Izzet said, with resignation. It was clear that he did not at all like the idea of the contract, though I find it difficult to see why.

'When will it be ready?' I said.

'In some days. When can he pay the money?'

'I can pay a deposit,' Mister Bowles said. 'Say five per cent of the total. When the contract is signed, that is. The balance may take a few days longer. I shall have to effect a transfer from my bank in London through the Ottoman Bank in Constantinople and then to the bank's agent on the island.' He hesitated for a moment, then said, 'I did not expect to need so much money here.'

Was it the pause, the addition, that made me doubt him? He was not given to explaining himself. Surely, if he were writing a book, as he says, he must have anticipated some such expenditure. Perhaps, of course, he did not realise that the ruins were so extensive.

Izzet did not look very happy, either, when I translated. Still, five per cent is not bad, considering the exorbitant price of the lease. If Izzet was thinking of delaying the contract till the balance arrived, Mister Bowles's next words put an end to such hopes. 'The contract must be ready for tomorrow,' he said, 'so that I can get started. I have no intention of arranging for the transfer until the contract is signed.'

'Very well.' Izzet shrugged his thin shoulders. 'You will call for the contract at my office,' he said to me. 'Shall we say at five?'

Izzet accompanied us to the foot of the steps, past the silent soldier in his box. There we shook hands and left him.

In the fiacre, on the way home, Mister Bowles and I sat as before, side by side, but I felt a difference. What had happened in the room behind us had made us, in a way I found difficult to define, accomplices.

I think it was Gesing's name I heard, Excellency. I am almost sure of it. He must be important in some way: Mahmoud Pasha rose almost with alacrity at those few whispered words.

The curiosity about the message remains with me. As does that faint suspicion of Mister Bowles – not suspicion exactly, but a feeling of complicity, of being leagued with him in some enterprise the nature of which I have not yet fully understood. That day in Lydia 's studio I felt something of this. A kind of acknowledgement. From the very first day, the day of his arrival, I felt included in his purposes.

The Greeks do not speak to me, Excellency. They do not look at me. In their minds they have written finis to me. I trail silence with me wherever I go. I am insubstantial to myself. Only here, in this room, where the silence is of my own contriving, only here do I assume my gravity of flesh. Only when writing am I real to myself, and only then is my death completely real to me. It is here I experience my worst fear of death. I look at my hands, so cu

Sometimes I dream of getting off the island, getting to Constantinople, finding out what has happened to my reports. I would dedicate it to you, Excellency. My book. There is material for several volumes. I have not yet decided on a title. When I think of this possibility, this crowning of all my life's work, my heart expands with delight. Everything, then, would have been worth it, poverty, loneliness, my narrow life. But it will not happen.

Meanwhile the days succeed one another, days of summer. Hazy mornings, glittering noons, velvet evenings. I wake with the light and seat myself here early, while the mist still lies along the join between the nearer islands and the sea, and along the distant promontories of Asia. I sit here watching this beautiful inter-action, this complicity – that word again – between sea and sky, the way hazes soften the complicated folds and recesses of land-as if these wilful masses needed protecting, the sharp promontories needed sheathing.

The sea is always present to me, whether within sight or not; there on the limits of my existence, glimmering in delicate perspectives or standing brilliant and vertical on the same plane as the sky; there as an element in the light, imparting its own quality of radiance. This pervasiveness of the sea, common to all small islands, gives a provisional quality to life. Exquisite matings of earth, water and air gave us our being here, and still they live in ménage à trois, without those désillusions said to be inevitable. If there is ever a real quarrel we shall be engulfed. Meanwhile the dalliance continues, a game of creation in which islands on the horizon and islands in the sky are glimpsed, surmised, lost again, and shapes of land lodge, swim, dissolve. Out there, far away, on the furthest verge of vision and beyond, other beings inhabit those fleeting shapes, and from their stillness-which seems like motion to me- they are watching with wonder the short-lived shape on which I count for permanency.

It is no wonder, Excellency, that so many philosophers have come from this world – Ionia or the nearer islands. I mean the artist-philosophers who tried to interpret the universe. Not riddling, posturing Socrates, stroking his beard and asking for definitions. Detestable man. No, I mean those who came before that. Faced with the manifold illusion of the senses, the paradox of permanence and change, in this light at once clear and deceiving, they sought always for an extreme explanation, a principle of unity. What a leap of the mind that was, Excellency. What a giant stride. They freed us from matter, to which, of course, with modern science, we are again subjected. Those who talk of the Greek sense of balance, of the Golden Mean, forget these holy extremists. It is in extremes that the true Greek spirit lies. Pythagoras, Empedocles, Herodotus, Anaximander – the very names have a delightful cadence. I see them standing on these shores seeking to reconcile all apparent contradictions in a single dazzling formula. Parmenides is perhaps the one who best suits our condition, yours and mine, Excellency, as he suits all who fear dissolution. He says that motion itself is an illusion. The lunge of the knife, the revolts of subject states, illusory.

I have seen Mister Bowles again. Not half an hour ago, I saw him, walking along the shore below my house. He was going towards the headland, as usual. Presumably he will follow the same procedure as before, climb up into the hills from the far end of the bay. It must take him three hours at least of strenuous walking, over difficult terrain, to reach the ruins up there. There are no paths. No one goes there much now. Certainly it ca

He has the contract now, at least. I took him two copies, having first checked the wording with Izzet. It was written in Arabic characters, and extremely convoluted in style. However, the area in question was precisely delineated; it was specified that no building operations of any kind were to be undertaken, nor any work of mining or excavation to be carried out; the sums were correctly stated, and the dates of the lease; each copy bore the signature of the Pasha, and the official seal.

'I like everything to be clear and above board, you know,' Mister Bowles said, when I gave him the papers.

'I, on the other hand,' I said politely, 'prefer a certain degree of fruitful murk.'

'How do you make that out?' he said negligently. He had not expressed any thanks for the trouble I was taking on his behalf, nor had he referred again to the question of a fee for my services. Ridiculously enough, I could not remind him, Excellency, I still want his respect, still nurse some remnants of that feeling I had at first, that he might like me, that we might become friends. We were in the lounge, under the sternly lecherous eye of Prussian Zeus.