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with Aten and played with the children. It was the same story as with the matriarchs of Seatown: Moni was impressed, and mystified.
    “This girl is
extremely
learned,” she said. “And so young. Who
can
she be?”
    I’d been afraid Kore wouldn’t get on with Anthe and Palikari. She was so proud and reserved, I’d thought she’d look down on my friends. I was wrong about that. In a few days she was best mates with Anthe, our impulsive, sarcastic wildcat. She had Pali confiding in her, as if she was his big sister, about the painful state of his heart. He had no prospects, nothing but his place at Dicty’s. How could he convince Anthe to accept him as a serious marriage suitor? I’d see the two girls with their heads together. I’d see Kore listening to Pali’s troubles whileshe helped him clean up behind the bar, and I was terribly jealous. But we didn’t talk about our real troubles. Whatever she heard about the truce between Papa Dicty in Seatown and his brother in the High Place, she didn’t hear it from us. And she didn’t tell us her secrets either.
    The feeling that everything had come to a crisis slipped away from me. Yet the tension was still there: in her somber eyes, in the burden she would not share. She was playing a part—trying to be this other girl, Kore, traveling to see the world, our new best friend. But you’d look around and she’d be gone. She’d be back in that poky little room: alone, silent, working at her loom.
    I went up to the roof one night, with the feeble excuse that I was bringing her a better lamp. The door was half open, so I could see her at work. Mémé was curled up on some hanks of green yarn, Seatown yarn: a gift from Balba. Everyone could get close to Kore except me. I even envied the cat. I knocked on the wood. She looked around, and didn’t say a word. At least she didn’t say go away. I propped myself on the doorjamb. “You’ll ruin your eyes.”
    But it was impossible to “make conversation” with this girl. She’d look you dead in the eye, and your pointless phrases crumbled.
    “Am I using too much oil? I’m sorry, I forget myself. I’ll stop.”
    “Oh no!” Panicked by her nearness, I heard my voicecome out as a strangled yelp. “I, uh, brought you a better lamp…. Kore, don’t you
ever
sleep?”
    It was easier to call her Kore now that we weren’t speaking Greek. A lot of islanders have Greek names, after all, including myself. They’re fashionable.
    “Of course I do.”
    “I just wondered, because I hear your loom going through the night.”
    She counted threads with her shuttle. “I’m sorry if I keep you awake. Sometimes I just don’t get sleepy.”
    “Nor I, sometimes. What are you working on? I can’t make it out.”
    “It’ll make sense when it’s done.” Then she turned and smiled, the same look in her eyes as when she’d laughed at me, on Naxos dock, in that moment when I’d
known
that she felt the same shock of fire as I did. “At least, I hope it will.”
    I said good night. I left her and lay awake with that smile in my arms, like a barbed treasure. How could I feel like this, whenever our eyes met, if she didn’t feel it too? I love you but it can’t happen, that’s what she was telling me.
    Adamant, absolute …
    My mother, when she’d seen the way Kore behaved, said,
There’s a girl who has been watched and kept indoors all her life
. But I felt that my girl (who could not ever be mine) was in a prison of her own making. She was behind bars even now: shackled by chains no one else could see.

K ore had been with us ten days; midsummer was upon us. It was the hottest part of the afternoon. I was renewing our whitewash: on the trees, along the coping of the terrace wall and around the flagstones, ready for the festival. The hearth burned low. Mémé the cat and Brébré the ferret were fast asleep on the bench beside it, curled together so that you could hardly tell where orange-spotted tabby cat ended and