The first lie the coast told her was that it was beautiful, and the terrible thing was that the lie was true.
They came over from Corfu on the midday boat, she and Dritan, across a strait so blue it did not look like a real colour, and the town rose up out of the heat-haze white and gold against its dry mountains, tumbling down to a curved bay where the water went from turquoise at the sand to a deep held blue further out, and Nada stood at the rail and felt the whole place reach out and take her the way it took everyone. She had been to a great many towns. She had been moved on from most of them. She had never in her life arrived anywhere that wanted her the way this place seemed to want her — the warmth of it, the light, the smell of salt and pine and grilling fish and somebody’s cheap sweet perfume, the promise, thick in the air as honey, that here, at last, you could be happy.
To her sight it was gold. She had been seeing light her whole life and did not yet know it meant anything here. Every soul in the crowd glowed its own soft colour, and the promenade shimmered: tourists and hawkers and children, old men playing dominoes in the shade. A good crowd, her grandmother would have said, reading a street the way she read a fire. Nada walked into it on Dritan’s arm and let herself, just for an afternoon, be warmed.
It was cheaper than anywhere had a right to be, and lovelier, and that was the second lie, the one that should have warned her, because a thing that is both is a thing that is paying for itself some other way you have not been shown yet.
They had a room above a taverna for the price of a coffee back in the world they had come from, with a balcony and a bougainvillea and a view of the bay, and the woman who gave them the key would not quite meet their eyes, and Nada took it for the way of small places with strangers. Over the doorway to the stairs hung a small ugly cloth doll — a child’s teddy bear, worn to grey, tied there by its neck, its button eyes turned out towards the street. She saw it. She saw everything. She simply did not yet know what she was looking at, and there was a bear like it over half the doors in the old town, and garlic braided by the rest, and she took them for what a tired happy woman on a beautiful cheap coast takes such things for — charm, and superstition, and the picturesque.
They ate that evening at a table on the sand with their feet almost in the sea, grilled fish and rough white wine and bread, and the sun went down enormous and red into the strait, and the whole bay turned to beaten gold, and the music started up along the front — everywhere, all at once, a dozen bars waking into the evening — and the tourists came out gilded and laughing in their good summer clothes, and Nada, who had spent her whole life being nothing in the cold corners of towns like this, sat in the warm dark with wine in her and a good man’s hand in hers and thought, God forgive her, I could stay here.
She had been careful her whole life — careful in her bones, careful the way other people breathed — and the beautiful coast reached past every guard she had and set it gently down. For one evening, she was so glad they had come.
Dritan did not eat much. She noticed it the way she noticed everything, and set it aside, because he had been quiet since the boat, quieter the closer they came, and she had put it down to the strangeness of a homecoming he had told her almost nothing about. He kept looking up the hill. There was a hill above the town, above the old quarter, and on it the broken shape of some great ruined house against the last of the light — a burned-out grand hotel, the taverna woman had said when Nada asked, gutted in the war, nobody’s now — and Dritan’s eyes kept going up to it and coming away, up and away, the way your tongue keeps going to a broken tooth.
“We don’t have to stay long,” he said, once, into the dark, to no question she had asked. “A few days. I just — I had to see it. Once. I don’t even know why.” He turned her hand over in his, the way he did. “Is that mad? To cross a sea to look at a thing you spent your whole life running from?”
“No,” Nada said. “That’s the only reason anyone ever crosses a sea.”
She meant it kindly. She did not know what was on the hill above the pretty town, or what it had wanted, once, from the bright boy beside her.
That first evening there was only the gold going out of the water, and the music, and the wine, and the warm sand — and, over the door of the taverna behind them, a small grey doll with its button eyes turned out to the street, watching, while the strangers laughed by the sea and not one of them, on such a lovely night, thought to look up at the dark shape of the house on the hill.