Lives in Ruins by Marilyn Johnson

Author:Marilyn Johnson
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: HarperCollinsPublishers

THE APOTHEKE WAS bustling the Saturday afternoon of the party, with ten toned and tawny NYU students toiling to hang outdoor lights and trim shrubbery and, with candles and sand, turn all those paper lunch bags I’d brought into lanterns. The students had each paid handsomely for the five-week dig* and like students in any field school, were expected to sweat and suffer, haul buckets of dirt, and scrub pieces of broken pottery with old toothbrushes. But these students had also been called upon to stage an elaborate party for the local Cypriot community and perform for the attendees. After their yard work, trimming the bushes and hanging the lights, they set up the lanterns—“Not that high up the hill!” Connelly called—then practiced a native folk dance and a local song in Greek. Squeezing in another day of excavation on Yeronisos cut into party preparation time, but our leader couldn’t resist the combination of placid seas and sunny days to seize the opportunity, and now things felt a little frantic. This was a planned invasion—Connelly and her team were eager to connect with the locals and celebrate Cyprus’s past and present—but nevertheless, a hundred people were dropping by soon and we weren’t ready.

I looked around at the unswept terrace and grabbed a broom. Nothing made me happier than to pitch in as part of Connelly’s team, and sweeping was something I knew how to do.

“Now we’ll set up the photo,” she directed, and we all trooped to the bluff where the piano had been rolled out. It was a stage set out of a colonial past, an effort to re-create the glamour of the great era of exploration, though this project and the party to celebrate it were the opposite of colonial. Connelly stood at her tripod with the expedition camera and composed the shot: one of the two handsome young male students was designated the “wounded warrior” and stretched out, head propped on his arm, in the foreground. Talia sat in the slingback chair. Connelly’s two colleagues, Paul Croft and Richard Anderson, stood attentively beside the piano, and Connelly’s nephew and a local twelve-year-old, Andreas, a performer who taught the students their dance moves, crouched at the foot of the bench where Connelly would sit. I stood beside two of my trench mates, Yeronisos over my left shoulder. We would return to these spots in our party clothes for the official shot.

Everyone scattered to the two rental houses that served as dorms to dress up and hurry back to finish the photo session. Connelly was teaching us how to race from dirty dig and sweaty cleanup to sparkling party in twenty minutes flat. “The extremes! I love the extremes,” she exulted as we swapped boots for heels. “What I hate is the boring middle!”

Richard Anderson, an architect by training with a permanent sunburn who could talk knowledgeably about any subject, especially Byzantine churches, walls, and ruins, had changed into a jaunty plaid jacket and looked as if he had

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.