The Names

Dick and Dot, the Bordens, greeted me at the door. In the living room a few people stood holding drinks. Before the others arrived, Dick said, he wanted to show me something, and led me down a long hall to the study. The floor was layered with rugs. There were rugs hanging on the walls and rugs draped across the sofa and chairs. He showed me rugs rolled up in closets and rugs wedged under the desk. He walked me around the room, talking about the acquisition of particular rugs. Visits to dealers in Dubai, to warehouses in Lahore, to Turkish weaving areas. The color in this prayer kilim comes from the roots of certain grasses. You can tell children worked on this Bokhara because the knots aren't banged down tightly. Dot came in to ask what I wanted to drink, then joined us briefly, happy to trade voices with her husband, to recite stories about bargaining for rugs over jasmine tea, getting rugs through customs, photographing rugs for insurance purposes. Investments, she said. Supply was getting scarce, value was bound to increase, they were buying all they could. War, revolution, ethnic uprisings. Future value, future gain. And in the meantime look how lovely. When she left, Dick got down on his knees to lift the edges of rugs arranged in layers on the floor. Hexagons. Stylized flying birds. Palmette stars. He threw back the edges to show more, the mellow colors of an old kilim made by nomadic weavers, a double prayer-niche that allowed both young and old to pray. He threw back entire rugs to show the full surfaces of what lay beneath, the patterns multiplying inward. He was not thinking of investments now. There were grids and arabesques, gardens in silk and wool. He pointed out multiple backgrounds, borders with formal Kufic lettering, things drawn together in crowded surfaces, a contained and intricate rapture, the desert universe made shapely and complete. He bobbed his smallish, round and almost hairless head, speaking in a soft hypnotic singsong. Geometry, nature and God.The living room was crowded when we got back. I was drinking raki for no good reason. David introduced me to a man named Roy Hardeman. I looked at the wall-hangings, the silk calligraphy. They have a tendency to crowd together in doorways, leaving the cinema for instance. A woman's voice. One thing I will say for the English, we don't block exits. Lindsay stood across the room, laughing. What was it about our lives that year we were together that made us so ready to laugh? We were always laughing, it seemed, as if impelled by some quality of the sky on clear nights, the mountains around us, the sea at the foot of Syngrou Street. Hardeman said something. He was a small correct American who stood with his legs together, feet slightly parted. Based in Tunis, David said. Travels widely in North Africa, Western Europe. The pinched face of a killer executive. Dot moved toward me with a bottle three-quarters full. I realized why the name seemed familiar. Refrigeration systems. He was the man who hadn't showed up the night David and Lindsay went swimming in their clothes. A sandstorm in Cairo, someone had said. But who? Dick went down the hall with three Armenians from Tehran, here to get Canadian visas. I asked David if he'd gone to Frankfurt. He paused to wonder. Charles Maitland entered, full of chummy belligerence. A