always been told that my face keeps changing. My colleagues, the ones who are close to me and dare to say what they think, maintain that I wear a different face every morning. I'm not like Janus with only two faces: I have ten or fifteen masks that are always changing. Unseen hands place a mask over my face as dawn breaks, and I have no idea what expression I'm wearing on that particular day.
That is an image that frequently crops up in her dreams.
Louise Cantor, archaeologist, bent over an excavation with a classic Hellenic mask covering her face.
She went back to bed, but was unable to go back to sleep. The nagging feeling of despair refused to go away. She phoned Artur. There was no reply. On the spur of the moment, she looked up Nazrin's telephone number, but there was no reply there either. She left a message on the answering machine and said that she would be in touch later, although it was rather difficult as she was on a journey.
When she was about to leave the room and find somewhere serving coffee, she noticed that Aron had left his room key on the table.
During the time of suspicion, when I thought he was being unfaithful, the years before our marriage collapsed, I used to search through his bags and pockets in secret. I would read his diary, and always try to be first to collect the post as it dropped through the letter box. If now had been then, I would have taken the key and unlocked his door.
She was embarrassed by the thought. When she was in Australia, in the house with the red parrots, she had never had the feeling that there was a woman in Aron's life, somebody he was hiding away because Louise had turned up. Even if there had been another woman, it was nothing to do with her. The love she had once felt for him was not something that could be dug up out of the ground and restored once more.
She had coffee and then went for a walk. It occurred to her that she ought to phone Greece and talk to her colleagues. But what could she say?
She paused in the middle of the pavement and realised that she may never return to Greece to work, just for a few days to fetch her belongings and shut up the house. The future was a blank page. She turned round and went back to the hotel. A chambermaid was busy in her room. Louise went down to reception to wait. A beautiful woman was stroking a dog, a man was reading a newspaper with a magnifying glass. She returned to her room. The key was still on the table, Aron still hadn't come back. She pictured him inside a church, with a candle in his hand.
She knew nothing about his pain. One of these days he would be transformed into a volcanic eruption. The hot lava compressed inside him would force its way out through cracks in his body. He would die like a dragon spitting fire.
She rang Artur again. This time he answered. It had snowed during the night. Artur loved snow, it made him feel secure, she knew that. She told him that she was in Barcelona with Aron, and that they had discovered a flat belonging to Henrik that nobody knew about. But she did not say that Henrik was HIV-positive. She was unsure how Artur would react. It was a brief call, Artur never liked talking on the telephone. He always held the receiver some way from his ear, forcing her to shout.
She hung up, then made a call to Greece. She was lucky and spoke to the person who had replaced her in charge of the dig, a colleague from Uppsala. Louise asked how the work was going, and heard that the autumn excavations were coming to an end before everything closed down for the winter. Everything was going according to plan. She had decided to be very clear about her own role. She simply did not know when she would be in a position to take up her duties again. It was not all that important just now, winter was approaching and fieldwork would be suspended. Nobody knew what would happen next year, if the necessary grants to continue the work would be approved.
She was cut off. When she tried the number again, she heard a female voice speaking Greek. Louise understood that