Free The Edge of the Earth by Christina Schwarz Page A

that we’d begun to chaff him about it.) “And then we’ll eat again. That’s the way to spend a Saturday!”
    We were to meet on Wisconsin Avenue at the entrance to the exhibit in the afternoon. The day was warm; snowbanks collapsed, revealing pure, clear crystals packed beneath the winter’s crust of black soot pitted with horse urine. Although my mother had insisted I carry my muff, I left my coat open so as to show off my blue silk dress. I wore my Easter hat, a large fruited affair that slipped sideways, despite its pins, when I tossed my head.
    I’d meant to wear my coral necklace, but it wasn’t in the box where it belonged. My mother had surely picked it up from wherever I’d left it lying, but I didn’t want to ruin my happy mood by asking and being scolded for not taking care of my things.
    Ernst and Oskar were waiting, Ernst smiling, with a fan of tickets in his chestnut leather glove; Oskar frowning and stroking his mustache distractedly. I kissed Ernst lightly on the cheek in greeting, and then, on a whim, kissed Oskar, too. He started and furrowed his brow, looking quickly away.
    “Are you in one of your moods,” I teased, “or merely contemplating the riches of the classical world?”
    “Hmph,” he grunted. “Are those my only choices?”
    By this time, a group of about thirty were chattering near the entrance, and the door to the panorama hall was opened by a man in an oxblood uniform with gold braid along the shoulders. He collected our tickets and directed us into a dark passageway; its novelty and air of mystery heightened our anticipation.
    “When you emerge,” a sonorous voice said from farther up the passage (“Our spirit guide,” I whispered) “you will be transported to a different place, a different time. You will find yourself in Ancient Greece, land of poets and philosophers, of architecture and sculpture, of olive groves and wine-dark seas.”
    “Of cabbages and kings,” I added to my group, resisting being swept away by this manufactured drama.
    At the end of the passage, we remained in the dark, but the panorama was lit up before us. We seemed to be seeing the city—was it Athens?—from a roof or perhaps from the top of a high wall. To the left, a market bloomed and bustled, patterned fabrics were draped over lines, terra-cotta pots were strung on ropes, silver fish were packed head to tail in long, low baskets.
    “Look,” Ernst said, pointing to a wolflike dog that was running down an alley trailing links of sausages, “the Greeks had bratwurst!”
    Fountains poured and gardens wound, each botanic specimen delineated. In an olive grove, men sat under the gray-green trees; near one of the fountains, women with hair braided and twisted into crowns stood talking, their earthenware water jugs resting at their feet. Interiors were visible as well: a hand plucked an olive from a dish; a woman played a small harp. The whole of it was so lovely, such an exquisite mixture of liveliness and tranquillity, that I instantly surrendered my ironic distance and wished that I could step into the scene, put my foot on the stone path that scarred one of the green hills, and simply run up it to the Acropolis, where the temples stood intact to welcome the gods. Just as the spirit voice had promised, I’d been transported to another place.
    “Look here, Trudy!” Lucy tugged at my sleeve.
    She was studying a green plain that became a yellow beach that became the sea, not wine-dark, as poetically promised, but a blue as brilliant as the sky. In the foreground, long black ships crowded the harbor, and in the background were more sails, sharp-edged and white, like the triangles of paper a child drops when she is cutting snowflakes.
    “I don’t believe there is any real sky that color,” I said, attempting to break the spell that gripped me. “The sky must be the same wherever you go.”
    “I’ve read that it is different,” Oskar assured me. “Something about the intensity of the sun