Passage I

PROSE FICTION: This passage is adapted from the short story "Dream Stuff" by David Malouf (©2000 by David Malouf).

One of the few mementoes Colin's father had left was a little green-bound pocket diary in which, for a few days in Athens, in the year of his death, he had recorded what he had seen of a city whose every monument he had already wandered through in dreams, but which had to be excavated, by the time he got there, from towers of rubble.

What moved Colin when he first turned its pages was the passion he found even in the driest details, and the glimpse he got, which was clear but fleeting, of a young man he felt close to but had barely known, and who had himself to be resurrected now from scribbled notes and statistics, tiny painstaking sketches of capitals and the motifs off daggers in a dusty museum, and from half a dozen hastily scrawled street maps.

He stuffed the diary into the bottom of his ruck-sack and when, at the end of his first year in Europe, he went to Athens, spent a whole day trying to match the sketches to a modern map of the city.

What he had hoped to recover was some defining image of his father, some more intimate view of the amateur classicist and champion athlete who had played so large and yet so ghostly a part in his existence. He stood at corner after corner turning the sketch-map this way and that until, admitting at last that he was tired, he took himself off to a café.

He was settled there when he was approached by a stranger, a fellow not much older, he guessed, than himself, but with a gold wedding-band on his finger, who seemed to have mistaken him for someone else. Anyway, they got talking, and when his new friend, out of pure pride in the place, offered to show him around a little—the sights, the real sights—he accepted.

His guide was so knowledgeable, that Colin, who had been wary at first, was soon at ease. And it was astonishing how often it happened that Giorgios in his excitable way said: 'Look, Colin, now look at this,' and there it was, just what the diary had described as being wonderful but hard to come upon and which on his own he had been unable to find.

They moved deeper and deeper into a maze. Everything here was a patchwork in which bits of one period were used to hold up or decorate another, so that styles and centuries tended to collapse into one another. As the afternoon wore on, the sights closed in. They were in a tangle of narrow streets where men with baskets were selling twists of salt-crusted bread and sticky honey-cakes; a crowded place, noisy, where his new friend seemed to know everyone they met, and introduced him to men who showed him brasswork and silver and other antique relics, but gave out, in an obscure way, that they had other wares to dispose of, though he could not guess what they might be and his new friend did not explain.

They stepped into one dark little café and afterwards he had the sensation that time was more a continual looping here than a straight line. He half expected, as a narrow street turned back upon itself, to see his father appear in the shadowy crowd, though there was no indication in the diary that he had been in this place. Then quite suddenly, in a poky alleyway with stalls full of brazen pots and icons, his friend was gone.

It was the oddest thing imaginable. One minute he was there, as affable and eager as ever, and the next he had slipped away.

There was no misunderstanding. Or if there was, Colin had failed to observe it. Perhaps his guide had lost patience with him, with his failure—was that it?—to catch at suggestions. Or he had seen friends close by and, not wishing to desert him openly—anyway, the occasion was broken off, that is what Colin felt. Things had been moving towards some event or revelation that at the last moment, for whatever reason, had been withheld.

He was disappointed for a time, but came at last to feel that it might have been the best thing after all. But the teasing suggestion of something more to come, which was unseen but strongly felt, and had to be puzzled over and guessed at, appealed to him. To a side of him that preferred not to come to conclusions. That lived most richly in mystery and suspended expectation. The afternoon had a shape that he came to feel was exemplary, and his readers might have been surprised to know how often the fictions he created derived their vagrant form, but even more their mixture of openness and hidden, half-sought-for menace, from an occasion he had never got to the bottom of. He had gone back time after time and let his imagination play with its many possibilities.