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night—something he could actually hold in his hand as proof that he’d finally done it, and was in love.

Chapter Six
    The next day was Sunday. Rebecca woke up and took a shower. Then she tidied her studio. When everything was put away, she felt like going out and decided to visit the narrow lanes of the Monastiraki flea market. She picked out a pair of plain white pants, but nothing so tight as to have Monastiraki’s thin-haired vendors barking at her to come over. She had outgrown the need to be admired by men she was not interested in.
    The flea market attracted many different groups of people. The low working class who looked for things they could sell for a small profit. Bohemians (usually foreign) fascinated by the plethora of random objects and the cultural diaspora responsible for things like former Soviet Union military-issue binoculars (with a hammer and sickle hologram in the glass). Then there was the criminal element, who were omnipresent at most outdoor, public events in Athens, and who seemed interested only in looking about the crowd, as though picking out specific faces for their vicious fantasies.
    For Rebecca, the most important member of the flea market community was the laturna man, a decrepit organ grinder with a music box on wheels from the 1850s. He would wheel his cart from corner to corner, stop, turn the organ wheel, and then sing. His voice was old and cracked, like the record embedded in his machine. To Rebecca, he was like some mythical figure from another time. And she found him beautiful without understanding anything that he said.
    The heat on the Athens metro was dangerous. Old women fanned themselves with rolled-up newspapers. The seats were wooden and passengers faced one another across tables, as though seated for a meal that would never come.
    She had eaten two croissants for breakfast, warmed on her patio in the sun. Then, barefoot, she drank ice-cold goat’s milk from a bowl, watching cars swerve around a dead dog.
    She climbed the steps from the metro station to ground level past two grimy teenagers injecting heroin. Monastiraki was packed—mostly tourists who’d spilled over from the Plaka. There were also scores of pickpockets trailing American and German tourists who had strayed from their tour groups.
    The alleys of Monastiraki were dark and hot. Vendors hung merchandise from every possible corner of the street. Small alleys led to stairs that opened upon rooms of French tableware, porcelain dolls, family photographs, a silver headlamp quietly unscrewed from a Rolls Royce Silver Ghost parked at the base of the Acropolis in 1937. There were other things too, with a more sinister past. One vendor had a stack of Nazi soldiers’ helmets with the letters SS painted on the side in gothic script, Nazi silverware, mugs of random bullets, knives, handcuffs, and old mouse traps rusted shut.
    You could buy 1930s medical instruments, a collection of playing cards from hotels in the south of France, surgical masks, Venetian masks, and monogrammed butter knives.
    Her eyes drifted over the mountains of junk that lay on blankets next to refugee women with scarves tied over their heads. Everyone was coated in sweat. And in some corners, stringy meat cooked on small gas burners.
    Then a face in the crowd stood out to her. A man with black hair and dark eyes, unshaven. Rebecca strained to see with the vague feeling that she knew this man.
    Breathless, she squatted to find a space in the crowd through which to view him better. A woman yelled at her in Russian, suspecting a thief. Rebecca stood and walked away briskly.
    An hour later, perusing the many things for sale (but still in the fury of her experience), Rebecca spotted a rare book with a paper cover.
    As she reached down instinctively to pluck it from a twisted ball of tattered clothes, another hand clasped the top of the spine. Without letting go, Rebecca looked up and saw the face of the man holding the book. It was the severe