Chapter One Excerpt

Nai?" Yes? snapped the waiter on his way to my table.  Several sets of customers had plopped down at the outdoor cafe at once, and he didn't want to lose any of them.  He was irritated, the kind of waiter who'd started the job thinking it would be temporary and then, twenty years later, realized it wasn't.
  
"Ena frappe," I answered.  "Gluko."  An iced coffee with sugar. Thanks to the word "glucose," gluko was one of the few Greek words I could remember without trying to.

The man frowned as he wrote down my order.  He hated giving up his table for a two-dollar coffee, and Mediterranean protocol would prevent him from hurrying me into leaving before I wanted to.  If the coffee compensated for jet lag the way I expected it to, that wouldn't be soon.

Dusk had rolled into the Plaka, and the relief brought by its shadows sparked action.  The tables around me were buzzing with young Americans scribbling postcards, retired Northern Europeans having a last drink before going to bed, and small groups of Greeks for whom the evening was beginning.  I kissed the summer air as a silent "thank you."

The waiter brought my frappe and put the ticket under the ashtray.  The drink was cold, but since he hadn't shaken it well enough, the sugar had sunk to the bottom and refused to mix correctly.  No matter.  I hadn't come for the coffee.  I'd come for the entertainment, for the trio fidgeting under the makeshift awning that protected the stage.

To me Greece had meant music ever since a university trip when, after a rough day of trying to separate Geometric pots from Archaic ones, Dr. Solomon had suggested a taverna called The Black Night.  There, between bites of a dish whose name I immediately forgot, I fell under the spell of the mandolin-shaped instrument called the bouzouki.  The setting was much like the mariachi restaurant where I played back in Tucson, relaxed and casual, but the sound was different.  The music was full of minor keys, haunting dissonances, and the inviting, mysterious sounds of a language I didn't know.  "S'agapo, m'agapas, I love you, you love me. When you're listening to Greek songs, that's all you have to know," Dr. Solomon said.  "You'll hear the same thing over and over."
  

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"You're going to Greece again?" my mother had asked a few weeks earlier.  She was hoping I'd spend the money on furniture--some outward sign of settling down.  Let's see--I could have two weeks of listening to bouzouki music every night after a long day at the beach or buy a couch and matching chair.  Why worry about furniture when my friends' apartments looked the same way mine did?  Besides, I was comfortable sitting on the floor.

It wasn't my mother's fault that she didn't understand.  A woman who couldn't sing "Happy Birthday" in tune couldn't be expected to appreciate Greek harmonies and rhythms.  If pressed, at least my little sister would humor me by listening to an island song.  She would tap her foot for several seconds before summing up her impression: pretty neat.

I snuggled my shoulders into the chair.  This was absolute comfort: a warm breeze, the cover of night, and the sweet enveloping of music.  Maybe the night air was throwing star dust in the wind, but the keyboard player was looking better and better.  The quick, jerky movements that puncuated his downbeats would work as well on a Latin dance floor.  He had the right expression to go with them, a sort of bemused pleasure, as if playing weren't constant rapture, yet he didn't mind that it wasn't, and anyway this was the next best thing.  I was in perfect agreement.