The Naming of the Beasts

It was built on the same scale as the yard, which was one degree up from Lilliputian, and despite the paint, which made a bold and optimistic statement, it had clearly been allowed to fall almost into ruin in recent years. The pitched roof was sway-backed, like a spavined horse, and there were great pockmarks in the limed rough-cast, showing bare single-skin brickwork beneath. Weeds grew up between the slate-grey flagstones of the yard, almost to the height of a man, and one of the windows had a perfectly circular hole through it, starred all around with fracture lines, the hallmark of a local kid with a catapult and a relaxed attitude to other people’s property.

The place made a bleak enough impression, but when Mr Anastasiadis wound down the car window, between one breath and the next a sweet smell of honeysuckle flooded in on us. It was growing wild up the outer walls and the house’s frontage, annealing the decay by immersing it in its own opposite.

‘I will wait for you here,’ Anastasiadis informed me. ‘In this neighboorhood, it is best not to leave the car unattended.’

It was hard to argue with that. In front of this tumble-down cottage, the Lexus looked like news from nowhere - something not just from another world but from another age of humankind.

I got out and crossed to the door. It was painted black, the paint now blistered and flaking where the slo-mo blowtorch of entropy had played across it. At first glance there was no keyhole, but actually it was only the lock plate that was missing. A small, neat circle had been drilled into the wood, close enough to the jamb to be in shadow and not immediately noticeable. I had to jiggle the key around in the blind hole until it found its berth, but then as soon as the key was turned the door sprung open of its own accord, the warped wood pushing it away from the frame with a dry twang like the sound of an arrow hitting a target.

The door gave directly onto a small living room. It was filled with an immense profusion of things. There were six ill-assorted chairs, beautifully carved but from two different tribes, the ladder-backs facing the wheelbacks across a farm-house table piled high with old newspapers. Newspapers served as curtains too, taped across the two narrow windows. Out in the centre of the room, beyond the table, stood an ancient iron mangle. Boxes lined the walls, two and three and four high. A tall dresser held not plates and cups but more papers along with a meerschaum sculpture of a tram and a radio with a red plastic casing that had to be 1960s vintage. From the ceiling (why waste a surface just because it’s upside down?) a massive drying rack hung on four pulleys. Yet more sheets of newspaper had been folded neatly over its wooden runners to shield any clothes that might be hung there from dust or splinters. There were no clothes, but a great many electrical flexes had been slung over the rack in long, neat rows, all ending in the two-pronged European plug. They looked like dead snakes hung up to cure, lolling their forked tongues.

The room smelled of dust and lavender. A slender blade of sunlight bisected it neatly where one of the sheets of newsprint had been poorly fitted into the window frame. Thick motes swirled in its glow on sluggish thermoclines, showing the air to be as heavily freighted as the solid ground.

I picked up a pile of papers at random from the dresser: old letters, old bills, old articles laboriously cut out with short-bladed scissors from defunct periodicals. The Ditkos had bought a lot of newspapers and had put them to a lot of uses, but clearly they had read the news in them too, and set aside the items that seemed worthy of being remembered.

The boxes seemed mostly full of crockery and cutlery, although one that I opened contained books. Crabbed writing on the lid of each presumably recorded its contents. It looked as though the family had moved from a bigger place and had never finished unpacking, maybe because there just wasn’t enough room here to hold their things. Or maybe some of these boxes held the things that Rafi had asked his brother to send on to England after him. In any case, there was nothing that corresponded to Mr Anastasiadis’s phrase ‘valuables or keepsakes’.

A single door led to a back room, off which a narrow staircase opened. It was much darker here. I groped for a light switch, found one at last to the right of the doorway and flicked it on.

A bare hundred-watt bulb flared into life over my head. From all around the room, a hundred Rafis stared back at me.

‘Sonofabitch!’ I muttered involuntarily.

‘His photos and his journals,’ Jovan had said - and he’d sneered at Rafi’s obsessive self-regard. Judging from this evidence, he hadn’t been exaggerating.