will it fruit? And if it does, what fruit will it bear? And she would touch the leaves with her pale fingertips—leaves that trembled at that contact, not after but before, as though in anticipation.
For Panioti, son of the woman who owned the village general store and gift shop, there came a night when the last metaxa was a drink too much. He was handsome as only a child of the sun can be, high of cheekbone and brown of skin, with the gloss of youth on him like velvet down and the idle assurance of absolute beauty. In the summer, he minded the shop for his mother and made love to all the prettiest visitors; in the off-season, he went to college in Athens, took life seriously, studied to be an engineer. “I do not believe in the loveliness of this unknown siren,” he maintained over the second to last drink, “or she would not hide herself. A beautiful woman puts on her smallest bikini and shows off her body on the beach. Has anyone seen her?” But none of those present had. “There you are. I won’t take her charms on trust; like any rumor, they will have grown in the telling. I want proof. I want to see her with my own eyes, swimming naked in the moonlight. Then I will believe her a goddess.”
“Why don’t you?” said one of his companions. “Hide in the olive grove down by the rocks. See for yourself.”
“He would never dare,” said another. “Bet you five thousand drachma.”
By the last drink, the bet was on.
The cove was inaccessible save by the path down from the house, so the following evening Panioti swam around the headland, coming ashore on the rocks in order to leave no footprints, and concealed himself among the olive trees at the base of the slope. He carried in a waterproof case a camera, the kind that would take pictures in the dark without need of a flash, and a bottle of beer. He sat under the leaves in the fading sunset, leopard spotted with shadow, drinking the beer slowly, slowly, to make it last. The dark had come down before the bottle was empty, and he thrust it upright into the sandy soil. He waited, impatient with the crawling hours, held to his vigil only by the thought of his friends’ scorn if he were to return too soon. At long last his wristwatch showed the hands drawing toward midnight. Now she will come, he thought, or I shall leave. But I do not think she will come.
He first saw her as a white movement on the path, her form apparently wreathed in a glittering mist, her dark hair fading into darkness. She seemed to glide over the uneven ground with a motion that was smooth and altogether silent; he almost fancied her feet did not touch the earth. The hair prickled on his neck. For a moment he could have believed her a pagan spirit, a creature of another kind whose flesh and substance were not of this world. Then as she descended to the beach he realized the mist effect was a loose, transparent garment that she unfastened and shed on the sand; her body glowed in the moonlight, slender and shapely as an alabaster nymph, a cold, perfect thing. She raised her arms to the sky as if in greeting to some forgotten deity, then she walked out into the water. The sea was calm and all but waveless: it took her with barely a ripple. He saw her head for a while as a black nodule silhouetted against the sea glimmer, then it dipped and vanished. Belatedly, he remembered the camera, extracting it from its case, waiting for her to reemerge. He half wondered if she would show in a photograph or if, like some supernatural being, she would leave no imprint on celluloid. He moved forward, lying along the rocks, poised and ready; but the swimmer did not return. She was gone so long his breath shortened in fear and he put the camera aside, braced to plunge in in a search he knew would be hopeless.
She reappeared quite suddenly, within yards of the rocks where he lay. He thought her eyes were wide open, staring through the night with the same dilated gaze with which she must have pierced the darkness undersea. She began to swim toward the shore—toward him—with a sleek, invisible stroke. Then abruptly she rose from the water;