start. Surcharged with new meaning, it entered my being, as he went on about the galleys and the old men “deep in the sea’s abyss.”

The phrase haunted me because it was he who lived in an abyss.

As days passed, defeat was all that we heard in our town, not outright defeat, but capitulation—retreat combined with truce, truce necessitated by deception. Or was it confusion? The soldiers I met, after their drunken reunions, spoke of the war with bitterness. Ten years, they said. Ten years, for what? And how many of us came back? Those who had been away longest considered themselves out­casts and those who had returned during the war complained, unable to recog­nize their families.

Standing on the wharf, I familiarized myself with the fleet, its remnants, an­chored forlornly in the bay, boys swimming around the hulls, the decks bone dry, hawsers trailing, a door off its hinges, the cordage so rotten a gull might topple a spar. Disgust in my mouth, I tasted the waste of life, Alcaeus’, my own, my friends’.

What is life for, but love?

And love sent Atthis and me along the beach, stretching our legs, running, dashing in and out of shallows, finding periwinkles, the day even-tempered, goats nibbling at wild celery, their bells lazy, a fisherman waving at us as he cast his net, clouds over the mountain. I noticed Atthis against the luminous water, her fragile face trusting life. Her yellow ringlets in my lap, she sang to me and then, eyes shut, fingers in the sand, she seemed to steal away.

“What are you thinking about, darling?”

“You...”

“What about?”

“You and Alcaeus—you are so troubled for him.”

“Then you have seen him?”

“Yesterday. And I’m afraid.”

“Why?”

“Because what is there left for him—and you?”

“I can’t answer you, Atthis. Time answers such questions.”

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