The cafés served one a tiny cup of sweet black goo to accompany a huge glass of ice-cold water. On the beach fences, posters with the name of a Russian soprano were growing tattered. The electric train that ran to Athens filled the idle blue day with a soft rumble, whereupon everything grew quiet again. The sleepy little houses of Athens reminded one of a Bavarian townlet. The tawny mountains in the distance were wonderful. Pale poppies quivered in the wind among bits of broken marble on the Acropolis. Right in the middle of the street, haphazardly, began the tracks on which stood the cars of resort-bound trains. Oranges were ripening in the gardens. There might be a vacant lot with a superb growth of columns—one of them fallen and fractured in three places. All of this crumbling, yellow marble was gradually being turned over to nature’s curatorship. Martin’s hotel, destined to remain new for its allotted span, would share the same fate. As he stood on the seashore with Alla, he told himself with an ecstatic chill that he was in a lovely remote land; and what a condiment that was to being in love, what bliss to stand in the wind next to a laughing woman with wind-blown hair, whose bright skirt would now be worried, now pressed against her knees by the same breeze that had once filled Ulysses’ sails.
