The cliff behind Martha threw a network of shadows over her and drew in the blue sky with an angular, irregular line. The sun pushed the flickering sea up around the bathers in the bay, whom Martha was watching from her chair, which was pushed half way in under a rocky protrusion. Lines of white fire billowed over backs, arms and breasts, the voices wove into patterns above the sun chairs to the accompaniment of a monotonous drone of the waves. The shade she was sitting in was damp and salty.

The cliff projected from the mountain and leaned out over the sea, out over the narrow strips of foam topping the waves, which were running in confusion in all directions in the stony inlet. Its shadow fell on a few bathers, tore their shoulders and faces free from the sparkling light that was throwing the remaining bodies hither and thither. The cliff leant out over the backs of fish that unexpectedly came into sight on the surface of the water, the sea urchins’ gleaming red spines, which declined in intensity where the salt water washed around them. The sea urchins held on firmly as though they were mineral excrescences, small growing jolts echoed in the stone.

Martha shuddered in the damp, the thousand-year-old sunless damp, only her leg was protruding and burning around her ankle, her foot was sticking out into the sea like the shiny, smooth back of a fish.

She watched three of the light-restless bathers, they were her family, a young girl, a young man and a middle-aged woman in a red bathing costume. On her head, the woman was wearing a white bathing cap with a border of marguerites. She was standing on a rock under the water, so that only her shoulders were above the waterline, and while the others were swimming she was studying the line drawn by the cliff against the blue sky, and speaking, solidly, incessantly, about the morning and its tribulations. About the wet, sweaty sheets she had had to wash before breakfast; about the eggs that had boiled far too long, so she had had to keep them for lunch, which was the next corner to be turned in her day, and which they would all turn after bathing.

The woman was Martha’s maternal aunt, Kamma. The words forced their way out of Kamma’s robust body, which was firmly planted in the water, their torrent fixed a fence around them all, Martha, her brother Adam and her sister Nanna, who were swimming and not listening to Kamma. A fence that protected them and enclosed them. A fence like a cliff of words.

*

High above the inlet, on a terrace belonging to the house they were renting, sat Peter, the father of the three siblings. He was tall and thin. His nose sharp and his eyes deep in their sockets, from which there rose a brown, almost orange colour that made his face unusually attractive. When he was sitting at the table on the terrace he had to bend forward and almost lie across it when he wanted to take hold of his coffee cup or the letter and his glasses, and while he was reading the letter he stretched his legs out and leaned back in the chair, which like the table seemed too small for his body.

He read the letter with obvious irritation. It was from one of his arrogant students who like others before him was trying to show weaknesses in the theory on the origin of writing in early Mesopotamia that Peter had proposed. Peter believed, and supported his theory on the basis of countless finds, that the invention of writing was the work of a single individual. He had written this in his scholarly papers and in his surprisingly popular book.

But with every generation of students there were horses that strained at the leash, some who loudly produced their own theses, influenced by the whims and fashions of theories. Now it was only possible to consider such a great invention as the product of a collective soul, whose material conditions demanded a form of communication that went beyond the spoken word. Now writing was a necessary extension of the human body as it behaved on its two legs. Now its origin was a coincidence, the final consequence of a series of coincidences winding their way down through the centuries. Peter listened politely to them, read their undergraduate dissertations and gave them as low a mark as he could manage.

This student, too, with the ridiculous name of Petrus, claimed to have a theory on the origin of writing that refuted Peter’s work. Like the others, he was ugly and assertive. But it worried Peter that this Petrus maintained that he had seen a number of hitherto unknown clay envelopes containing written characters similar in type to the fired clay envelopes containing simple clay figures that served for transmitting uncomplicated messages, and which most people agreed were predecessors of written characters. Petrus wrote in his letter that he would not go into details, for of course it was his discovery, and although he did not want to undermine Peter’s position – But that’s just what you do want, you self-important puppy, thought Peter – he would like to place a short article in a professional journal before initiating Peter into the source material.

Ridiculous, thought Peter, but he was irritated. It was getting too late for him if new finds were to appear. He would not falter: writing was the work of a single person.

Peter finished his coffee and put the letter in his pocket. He got up and leant out over the metal railings and tried to catch a glimpse of the inlet, whose blue waters were glistening between cypresses and stone pines. It was about time they came home.

*

The air was a thin silk sheet that was being shaken out over the inlet. Nanna was a crumb that had been shaken off the sheet down into the confusion, falling by chance into the water, where she was trying to swim towards the shore with rapid, inelegant strokes. Towards the shore the cliff rose with long, perpendicular grooves like the ruins of a column in some gigantic temple. There were inaccessible grottoes high up in the steep wall representing the eyes and mouth of this rocky face. Nanna shuddered and swam out towards Adam, who was floating on his back at the mouth of the bay, shining and smooth, his wet, fair hair sticking to a face that was rocking like an ear of wheat on the water.

Nanna thought of herself as built up of thin sheets of birch bark that had been pushed loosely one on top of the other, and the only thing she could do in her thoughts was to move aimlessly about on the sheets while swimming, and she observed her brother with a water-like, sober desire.

*

Adam was in a different world. He felt the muscles beneath his skin and the water’s pressure on the muscles, and how the water divided and bore him and tightly enclosed his body when he dived.

I am swimming, and the water is blue, he thought; and that was enough. He wasn’t listening to Kamma’s voice.

Let her jabber on, he thought and wondered whether he should go out in the boat tomorrow morning with Giovanni to catch octopuses. Giovanni’s boat had sailed past the inlet to the steep cliffs further out, and Adam had seen Giovanni submerge the heavy jars in the water. Now the octopuses were probably already sniffing across the seabed and forcing their way into the empty jars in the belief that this was a new, safe grotto.

Adam did not see Nanna’s look. He was too preoccupied with the young men sunbathing on the cliffs, their warm, clean outlines about the blocks of stone, the slightly separated legs, the deserted, colourful bathing towel, the owner of which was leading against the iron steps leading down to the sea, with his arms clasped in front of his body, his muscles slightly tensed. Adam devoured him, without anyone noticing.

*

Giovanni had walked behind him one evening when Adam had been walking on the paths in the park behind the town of Capri. He had fled from the bar because it was hot, he had been drinking so much that everything was spinning, and he wanted to breathe some fresh air, but the air in the park was nauseating with flowers that were surrendering scents to the darkness, and Adam continued down towards the water. He stopped when Giovanni slapped him on the back. They had each been sitting at separate tables in the bar. Adam was drinking, and Giovanni was playing cards with some other young Italians.

“I know what you want,” said Giovanni. “I’m a friend.”

So they became friends. Adam was to spend the entire summer in Capri. They talked of where the fish were to be found. Adam learned to swim with a spear in his hand and felt the fish tremble when he speared them. They discussed who was to drive up the winding road from the inlet and fetch petrol for the motorboat. They talked about the other boats. They were incensed when the warships threw their waste overboard so it stuck to their skin when they jumped into the water. They swam through the submarine passage into the Blue Grotto; it was like an eye, that hole, the sunlight penetrating beneath the water so the blue flames shone on the roof of the grotto. They stood together on the rocky ledge in the grotto and imagined Tiberius’ orgies on that very spot at a time that was too far away to be able to be recaptured, even if the place itself could be. Whence the horror from the slaughtered people hung in the air like a sudden impulse to get out, quickly, by the entrance above the water, where they scraped their arms and legs in a cold anxiety to get away, out to the light, the sun, the rocks, things that in their timelessness melted into a firm and inevitable present moment, without sacrifices and water saturated with blood.

*

Adam swam. He splashed water at Kamma and made fun of the marguerites in her bathing cap.

“Don’t be so childish,” said Nanna. “Don’t be like that.”

Don’t stand there, she thought, like a child hanging defencelessly in the air, an arrow dispatched without a will of its own, destined to strike a target it doesn’t know. It’s too exposed, there is far too much sun, too much delirium.

“Don’t be so childish,” repeated Nanna, looking sharply at Adam.

Her tone was sententious, reproving. Adam, the firstborn, the son. He was apparently brought into the world knowing no doubt, ruthless. How Nanna wished she were like him. She clambered up the iron steps and fetched Kamma’s towel and let herself dry in the sun while Kamma swam with slow, majestic strokes across to the steps, where she took off her bathing cap and shook her glowing red hair and clambered up and took the towel from Nanna.

“Thank you.”

This was what Nanna lived on. That someone thanked her, that she was seen, irradiated by another.

They need me, she thought, and her heart raced at the thought. They can’t manage without me.

Intoxicated by Kamma’s words, Nanna fetched her purse and ran across the narrow spit of sand so as not to burn her feet, and bought ice cream for them all. She was a bird flying across the sunbathers, flying and diving and rising again. She was a bird that landed in front of Kamma with the ices wrapped in thin, crackling paper.

“You’re surely not thinking of eating ice cream just before lunch,” exclaimed Kamma in horror and let her hand slide down over the red bathing costume and her moon-rounded stomach. Adam got up without a word and took his ice and ate it with his back to them.

Martha said no thank you. Adam took her ice and ate it as well. But Adam never said thank you.

Nanna was brought down to earth. They had rejected the sacrifice that justified her existence. The blue mass of the ocean depths enclosed the island. Nanna shivered with cold. She looked at Martha, who was reading a detective novel in the shade beneath the promontory. They were all so simple. Unambiguous. She thought that she ought to go home straight away, but nevertheless stayed and waited for the others to get ready.

*

While Kamma was taking off her swimsuit under a long flowered bathrobe, she thought of her sister, of Rose, the children’s mother, who was dead. As usual when she thought of her sister, her thoughts started with a sigh; it was sad that Rose had died while giving birth to Nanna, leaving three small children. Rose had been given the most beautiful name. She had lived up to it, as Kamma lived up being called Kamma. The only thing they had in common was the rhubarb-red hair.

Kamma believed that she could talk to Peter better than Rose did. It was she who had got to know him. She attended lectures on Middle Eastern archaeology, and like the other girls, she fell in love with him in a way that was more than a mere infatuation in which the teacher is the fulfilment of the desire for knowledge, where the line on his nose and the circular wrinkles around his mouth became one with his words, words that seemed wiser than those of other people. He seemed to be interested in Kamma. He praised an essay she wrote and in particular noticed a series of photographs she had taken of a group of simple large-eyed figures in which she had succeeded in capturing the art the artisan had mastered in order to produce the simplicity. She believed that Peter returned her feelings and invited him to her birthday party; she thought carefully about it, the other students in her class also came, it wouldn’t seem too noticeable. But Rose had been there.

There was nothing else to be said, nothing except that it was sad she was dead, leaving her husband and children. Peter continued to pat Kamma kindly on the shoulder even after he and Rose had married. And Kamma thought the two of them got on better together. She understood what he was talking about. Rose just looked at him and laughed and said that she thought it was too difficult for her to understand, and that in any case she found the present much more interesting.

“And that’s something Peter doesn’t know the least little thing about,” she added and laughed again.

Kamma could have murdered her when she laughed that ridiculous laugh. Rose didn’t understand anything. But the worst thing was that Peter didn’t in the least care about Rose’s lack of interest. He looked at her with his head slightly inclined and said that then they supplemented each other splendidly. And Rose was beautiful. She had children and continued to be beautiful. Kamma hoped that she would swell out. That she would become difficult and get lines under her eyes so that it could open Peter’s eyes to the foolishness and her superficiality. He said that Rose became more beautiful with each child. That, provided she would look after the present, he would look after the past himself. Kamma had reluctantly to admit he was right. It was as though Rose’s undeserved beauty increased. Until she died.

*

Kamma was at home with Peter and the two bigger children, who were not all that big, when the telephone rang, and they jumped up. Peter took the phone and listened. Then he took his clothes and slammed the door, and Kamma didn’t know what had happened until he returned in a taxi with Nanna and a bag of powdered milk and a feeding bottle that a nurse had given him.

“She’s gone,” he said.