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I took a bite of the apricot. Just one. It was very sweet and the juice ran down the side of my mouth. Then I put it on a chunk of a column that was lolling around at the foot of the hill.

“There,” I said, to any
kouroi
or gods who were waiting for an offering.

The car was fixed and the apartment was rearranged to my mother’s satisfaction or, “As good as it’s going to get.” Sunstroke and enchantment were behind me, and so were the long days of traipsing around with my father. My mother would not put up with that sort of rigorous program. Anyhow, now that we had the car, we could drive right up to what we wanted to see and afterward eat a two-hour lunch on a terrace under a grape arbor with a cat asleep in the corner and then spend some time in the little store beside the taverna looking at handwoven bags and shirts. Or, if we hadn’t gone too far away, just go home and take a siesta like normal citizens.

My father, of course, wanted to go too far away immediately.

“Let’s go to Mycenae,” he said.

I perked up. I really wanted to go there.

My mother said no. “It’s too far,” she said. “It’s too hot. And there are bandits.”

“There aren’t any bandits,” said my father. “Honestly!”

“George says there are. He says the whole Peloponnese is riddled with them. He says he’ll take us down there in the fall, when it’s cooler.”

My father frowned. “It’s barely the Peloponnese,” he said.

“George says we need an escort,” my mother repeated.

“When was this, anyhow? When were you and George having this conversation?” my father asked.

My mother blew one of her special I-don’t-care-what-you-think smoke rings.

“What do the bandits do?” I asked.

“Rob you, of course,” said my father.

“Sometimes they take you hostage,” said my mother.

“Annette!” My father dropped his hand on the vast mahogany dining table with a thud. “This is nonsense.”

“Mmm,” said my mother.

My father tried again. “Let’s go to Meteora,” he said.

“I think we should wait until, maybe, October.” My mother finished her cigarette. “When it isn’t as hot.”

“It’s in the mountains. It
is
the mountains,” my father said. “Is there anywhere at all that you would be willing to go? Epidaurus? How about Epidaurus?”

“Epidaurus is in the Peloponnese,” she said. “Sounion, that could be a nice trip.”

My father was silent for a minute. Then he said: “Why can’t you just come out with it? You could say, I want to go to Sounion, and forget all that guff about bandits. You could state at the outset what you want, and then I wouldn’t have to guess.”

My mother glared at him.

“I want to go to Sounion,” she said. “Okay? Happy?”

“Okay,” said my father. “We’ll go to Sounion.”

My mother got up from the table. “I’ll call George,” she said.

“What’s George got to do with it?” my father asked. “It’s not even fifty miles away. We don’t need George.”

My mother was already dialing. “We do need him,” she said.

My father shook his head. “Pirates? Werewolves of Sounion? What’s the problem?”

My mother and George fixed it for the day after.

“The roads are extremely bad, he says,” she told my father. “He’ll lead us.”

“Every road in this country is bad,” my father said. “Nothing special about that.”

George and his solicitude were a gift from Doxiadis, the mysterious outfit where he and my father worked, though they never seemed to do any work. A few days a week, my father went there for an hour or two in the morning, came home for lunch, went back for another brief spell, and was home long before dinner. When I asked him what Doxiadis was, he said, “Urban planning.” “What does that mean?” I asked. “Think tank,” said my father. “They think big thoughts.” “What do they think about?” I asked. “They think about how to bring Greece into the twentieth century,” said my father. Then he laughed. “That will take a few centuries,” he said, “so they’ll never catch up.”

Doxiadis was a person as well as the name of an institution. Once I saw him get out of a taxi at the entrance to our building, delivering my father home in the evening after an unusual day of real work. My view from the fourth-floor balcony was partial: bald head, long, lavish overcoat (it was December), graceful, gesticulating arms. From above he looked somewhat like a spider. Doxiadis—either the man or the company, or perhaps they couldn’t be distinguished—had found the apartment for us,
had arranged an end-of-the-summer cruise to Crete for us (this was the trip my mother had in mind when she said her “shrug” would be good for an evening on a boat), and had commissioned George to protect and guide us. Unlike George’s office job, this required a lot of effort.

George was in his mid-thirties, several years younger than my parents. He was quite short, as if he’d been underfed in his youth, and probably he had been. He’d made up for that in the postwar decade. His thin arms, narrow shoulders, and stalky legs attached to a solid, round middle composed of baklava, octopus, and retsina. Mustache, aviator sunglasses, suit and tie on all occasions, and his otherworldly courtesy could not quite disguise the nervewracked, melancholy inner George.

I liked George, in part because he treated me with as much formality as he did my father. My mother elicited something quite different from him—love, possibly veneration. Another reason I liked him was that his hunger made for a lot of refueling stops. He was the opposite of my father. Going on a trip with George was more about eating something delicious than seeing something beautiful. Few of his country’s monuments impressed him. Many Greeks were like that. George could eat moussaka sitting beside a rather well-preserved temple to Zeus and never turn his head to acknowledge it.

But Sounion: “This is my favorite spot,” he said. “I am delighted we are going there. Also, on the road is an exceptionally good place for barbounia. The little red fish—I don’t know their English name.”

“We probably don’t have them, so there isn’t an English name,” said my mother.

“Could be,” said George. “Or possibly, you don’t eat them. Poor countries are happy to eat what rich countries consider inedible.”

“Oh, right. The tragedy of Greece.” My mother always poked fun at George’s gloom.

“But it’s true,” he said, smiling. Then, to my father: “I have taken the liberty of leaving the Fiat at home to spare it the trip. May I ride with you, in the American car?”

“Sure,” said my father. “Anyhow, it’s easier than trying to follow you.”

George refused to ride in the front with my parents.

“I will direct you from the back,” he said. He wedged himself into the worst spot, straddling the hump in the middle, between my sister hugging her stuffed owl and me staring out the window.

Rocks, goats, a donkey pushed onward by a woman dressed in black, dust from the terrible road: Excursions in Greece were predictable. There was never anything but rocks and goats and donkeys and dust on the way to a broken temple or amphitheater. The countryside was a wasteland. Athens was different. Athens was alive. So what if the wrecked Acropolis brooded above everything, trying to remind you that time was coming to eat you up? Below it people were rushing around and cars were honking and waiters were pouring out tiny cups of coffee in a hundred cafés. Out in the hinterland we might as well have been on the moon. It was hard for me to believe that the ancestors of the old woman poking her donkey with a stick had built the temple whose remaining columns rose out of a nest of lizards and bracken off the road to our left, a site so minor we weren’t even stopping to look.

I didn’t like the red fish at the restaurant.

“It has too many bones for you,” George said.

I nodded.

Without looking up from his plate, George snapped his fingers.
This was the Greek way of summoning a waiter. I always felt embarrassed on the waiter’s behalf, though I could see that everyone thought it was fine. Our waiter came over and George barked at him. In a minute he was back with a bowl of boiled potatoes and a plate of feta pockmarked with olives. It wasn’t a big improvement, but I ate it anyhow. I didn’t want to spurn George’s efforts.

Then it was back into the hot car, more dust and donkeys, all of us sleepy from food. The cicadas screamed so loud I could hear them through the rattle of the tires over the ruts and stones.

All of a sudden there wasn’t any road. Also, the light had become even brighter and whiter. A salty wind whooshed into the open windows of the Chevrolet.

“We’re here,” George announced.

My father stopped the car. “We just leave it here?” he asked. “There isn’t some sort of parking lot?”

“Not necessary,” said George. “After all, no cars, right?”

“Maybe if there were a parking lot, more people—”

“Everybody know it’s here,” George interrupted my mother.

“
You
know,” said my mother. “Some German tourist doesn’t know.”

Snorts from George. “So much the better,” he said.

“My mistake. A stupid example. Let’s say a French tourist,” my mother said. “This is part of the trouble with Greece. It’s all so haphazard and disorderly. It’s unplanned.”

“You think perhaps there should be a souvenir booth selling small plastic columns on key chains?” George was teasing my mother, wasn’t he?

“I think a sign would be useful.”

George extended his skinny arm. “This way for panoramic view of the Aegean, sacred to Poseidon.”

“You can scoff, George,” said my mother, “but this is what Greece has got. This past is your future, and it’s foolish not to make intelligent use of it.”

“It will come,” said George. “The plastic-column key chains and the signs and the parking lots. And then”—he pointed at my mother—“you will be sad. You will be one of those who say, Oh, it was so wonderful before the parking lot and the sign. Won’t you?”

My mother laughed. “Of course I will. You’re right. But I’ll get to say that I was here before all that stuff. Also, I’m right too, and you know it.”

“Ah, life is impossible,” said George.

“We can agree on that,” said my father. “Do we go up this hill?” He took my sister’s hand and led the way.

My mother and George walked together, and I lurked in the rear. Blood-colored flowers were everywhere, dipping in the wind. “Are these poppies?” I asked.

“Yes, they are,” said George. “Don’t lie down in them because you will be drugged and fall asleep.”

“They’re anemones,” my mother said.

I wanted to lie down right away and go to sleep to prove my mother wrong. “Hurry up,” she said. “You’re dawdling.”

“The temple isn’t going away,” I said, but I picked up my pace a little.

And there it was.

Greece is too much for me, I thought. Greece makes me scared about how long time is, and it’s too hot and it’s boring and there are too many bones in the fish and now
this
. Why did my parents keep dragging me around to see things that were too big for me to contain?

Because there was so much less of it than there was of the Parthenon,
it was more frightening and more beautiful. Below, the sea was banging and banging. Whirly winds dashed around the last, leftover columns; the rest had dropped into the rocky surroundings. The marble floor slabs had been colonized by clumps of coarse grass. There was a sweet smell of salty vegetation.

“Look!” my father called. He was pressing his finger onto a column. “My God! Annette, come here! It’s Byron’s signature.”

My mother ambled over to him. “Did he come here with a chisel?”

“You mean Byron the poet?” I thought this made things even worse. This made the arcade of time even longer and more cavernous—to think this had been a ruin when Byron came, which was so long ago that it was already history in itself. It made me both dizzy and mad.

“Yes, the poet Byron,” said George. “I forgot to mention that, the famous signature. I wonder if he did indeed bring a chisel.”

“Maybe someone came after him and improved it. A post-Byronic chiseler.” My father laughed.

“It’s the Romantic-era equivalent of a souvenir stand,” my mother said. Then she too put her finger in the marble to trace the letters. “ ‘The isles of Greece!’ ” she said.

“ ‘Where burning Sappho loved and sung,’ ” my father responded. “It’s really just Kilroy Was Here, though, isn’t it?”

“It was the opportunism of the post-Byronic chiseler I was thinking about,” my mother said. “If Byron didn’t do it himself. Or even if he did, somebody must have gone over it afterward. It’s quite deeply incised.”

“You know, this is where Theseus’s father jumped off,” my father said to me. “I can’t remember his name. What was his name, George?”

“King Aegeus. Hence, this sea. The Aegean.”

“That was when Theseus forgot to change the sail from black to white? After he killed the Minotaur?” I was pleased to have remembered this.

“Right,” said my father. He shook his head and muttered, “How could I forget that, Aegeus. It’s ridiculous.”

“George,” I said, “was this temple here when King Aegeus jumped off the cliff?”

George made a torso-heaving Mediterranean shrug that expressed doubt about many more things than whether there’d been a temple here when Aegeus killed himself.

“Was there actually a King Aegeus?” He kicked the base of one of the columns, gently, so as not to hurt his foot. “There was a temple,” he said. “We can see that. There was probably some sort of a king. The rest?”

My mother had sat down on a chunk of stone, with my sister curled up in the grass beside her. My sister was asleep, my mother nearly so. The owl lay in the dust with his cotton face turned up to the sky. The cicadas were still screaming on the hill, and the sun was beginning to lower itself toward the Aegean.

“Coffee?” said George. “And a little galaktoboureko? I know just the place.”

“Do they have baklava?” I asked. Galaktoboureko was too creamy, a kind of wiggly junket jammed between phyllo sheets.

“There is always baklava,” George assured me.

My mother decided that George should ride in the front on the return trip. “I’ll just nap in the back with the girls,” she said.