They’d been together, on and off, for eighteen years. Then Haroula moved to London, though she’d spent her last years back in Athens, in my apartment. But that was only the beginning of the end. Their relationship was a slow, painful fade.
“Most of my friends who are lesbian, queer, have always known,” she continued. “Yet only half of them are out to their families. Maybe it’s different now, for young people. I can see it. But Greece is still a terrible place to be queer.” She told me she’d had a quiet but vibrant community here, though after she and Haroula broke up she broke away from them. It was too painful.
I nodded, keeping my gaze on the flat expanse of the sea. Somehow we’d never spoken of this before. “And your parents?”
“We fought over politics, not sex,” she said.
How could we distinguish the two? How could we extricate identity from anything, from politics, from the art we make, the stories we tell, the things we feel? But I knew to drop it.
She pulled her beach bag onto her lap and began rooting around for something. “People become uncomfortable when you can’t be pinpointed. Ambiguity makes people nervous. I’ve had two loves of my life, very different. One was when I was very young. It was also something we kept hidden. He was married.” She looked up at me to see my reaction.
“Not judging.”
“We were in a camp together during the junta.” Nefeli pulled out a little metal cigarette case painted with a watercolor of the Eiffel Tower. Inside were several tightly rolled joints and a pale-green lighter. She lit one of the joints, took a long drag, and then continued. “I loved this man, also an artist. It was mostly emotional anyway. Chaste. I was confused then; I didn’t understand my own sexuality. But it didn’t matter: he walked off the boat into the arms of his wife, the first I’d known of her. I remember her trench coat, her open, happy face, and I knew I never again wanted to be a ridiculous girl.”
Even though I had not known her then, Nefeli was easy to imagine as a teenager: the wide, amber-colored eyes, her hair still long and shiny and black. She continued: “He loved me like a little pet you take care of. You know what can happen to women in those camps. And when we returned, when the junta was over, he asked Nikos”—she paused, in case I hadn’t yet made the connection, though I just had—“the Captain’s father, to look after me. For years, I think he bought my paintings, instructed by this man. Eventually I think he gave them to Haroula.”
Nefeli stubbed out the rest of the joint, put what was left back in the small metal tin. “The body and mind are the same thing,” she said. I suggested lunch. We walked back to the taverna and sat at a table half in the sun, for me, and the shade, for Nefeli. Both the blonde woman with the kids and the handsome man were gone. Now, a table of sunburned tourists drank beers from frozen mugs.
We sat there a long time, ordering first a salad and then some fried zucchini that only I ate, and some fava. Nefeli didn’t eat meat and refused to sit with others if they did. We shared a beer and then another. Eventually she got up to use the bathroom, and when she returned she declared she had paid the bill, that she was tired and wanted to leave.
Nefeli immediately fell asleep as I drove, but after twenty minutes she awoke. We were nearing the center. The traffic was terrible. A strike, a protest, a 5K run—Nefeli wasn’t sure. “You know which two countries report the highest levels of stress?” she asked, staring out the window. I glanced at her so she’d go on, and she turned to me. “Greece and Iran.” She let out a deep breath.
The road felt like an enormous parking lot. Young men wandered between the stopped vehicles, dangled gadgets and toys in front of windshields, a captive audience in the gridlock, and I was surprised when Nefeli handed a man a couple of euros for a little wind-up toy.
After an hour we reached Nefeli’s, and I parked her car in the lot below her building. We each got out and hugged goodbye, but she hesitated before taking the elevator up. “I need to show this to you,” she said, scrolling through her phone. “I’m sorry I waited this long.”
I was hoping it had to do with her new work, something from her show. But it was an online magazine, and not even one of the more horrible ones, basically hypothesizing Aris and Eva as a couple. Eva was a fairly well-known actress, Greek French. In the past she’d done mostly smaller, artful movies, often French, but a new international hit with a Greek director had catapulted her into the spotlight. And Aris, after all, was a rising politician. They were both attractive and intelligent, and the Greek newspapers ate this up. I couldn’t bear to read it and handed Nefeli back her phone. “I’m sure these sorts of things are everywhere.”
“Scroll down.”
I did and was startled by my younger self, smiling like an idiot, walking up a marbled, narrow island street. It was more than a decade ago; I don’t think I was even thirty. I wore cutoff jeans and a blue bikini and held an ice cream cone—who knows where they’d unearthed this photo. The picture was juxtaposed with a horribly unflattering shot of Eva smoking a cigarette, looking angry. I had seen her in movies years before and knew she was beautiful, but the photo unfairly depicted a tired, too-thin actress who was not aging well.
Until, of course, the love of a man changed that: the next photo told a different story, the two of them together, each looking impossibly youthful. Eva had a deep intelligence in her eyes. Aris was smiling big, looking at something out of the picture, and Eva was looking up at him. When was this taken?
“I’m glad you showed me.” Of course I felt sick.
“You’re lying,” she said. “But in case someone else brought it up.”
“Who else reads this nonsense?” I asked. I was furious at the stupid magazine. It might as well have read, Upcoming politician rejects well-fed American and transforms aging, starving Greek actress.
Aris had stayed with me those two weeks after my parents’ deaths, in Chicago, helping me clean out their things. From there we made arrangements about where in Athens they would be buried. He tossed cardboard boxes of old magazines into recycling bins as if he were shooting baskets, and we made a race of how much we could discard in the shortest amount of time. I ran in and out of the house in a frenzy, but when I found the boxes of my father’s old records, I crumpled into Aris’s chest, and we didn’t do any more with the dumpster that night. I’m trying to reconcile those tender moments with the fact that already, at that time, he was with Eva. The worst part of a betrayal is trying to reconstruct the events around it: what you knew then and what you know now. But I have to believe his tenderness then was sincere and not simply a manifestation of his guilt, of the fact that his second narrative was occurring simultaneously. I know human relationships are complex and multilayered and fluid, that it is possible to feel things for more than one person, to want two opposing things. Eventually, you have to choose.
Still, it didn’t make it any easier to handle.
But besides the shame of Aris’s other romantic narrative, I felt spied upon retrospectively, as if something had been taken from me without my knowing it. Even in our tell-all, display-all world, I use social media sporadically. The few photos circulating of me have been posted not by me but by friends. Perhaps it’s the dissonance that’s too much, the fragments that never make a whole: here I am in a bikini on the beach, here I am with a glass of wine and a big grin, here I am giving a lecture, here I am by the sea.
I told Nefeli I’d see her that weekend, at Fady and Dimitra’s. Then I turned and headed down the sidewalk toward my apartment.
I admit that I don’t always see the things people say about Athens—it’s dirty, it’s chaotic. Sometimes I’m not even sure what people are talking about. It’s a city. There’s traffic. If anything, people are always sweeping the sidewalks and washing the staircases. But after the sea that day, the freshness of the breakup and the sting of those photos, Athens felt like an assault, like all its violations were announcing themselves to me, questioning my decision to be there—the traffic stopped everywhere and people honking
their horns, frustrated in their cars. Every car, it seemed, confined couples and lovers bickering over the route not taken; or sitting silently, the passenger staring at their phone and the driver at something ahead they could not see. I noticed all the boarded-up buildings, the closed businesses. I ducked down a side street and passed a young man in a blue-and-black flannel shirt rolling up his sleeve, his other friend watching, waiting. Sure, you might have run into a person strung out near Omonia, wandering around the Archaeological Museum, far before this new crisis. I distinctly remember Haroula telling me, when I was eighteen, in English, as if this could not be uttered in Greek: Watch out for junkies. Yet unless I was in a particular neighborhood at night, I never really noticed, but Nefeli, who seemed to absorb the shame of the entire nation, claimed people shot heroin on the streets the way Americans walked around with their giant cups of coffee. If my American friends had said something like this I would have bitten off their heads.
And wouldn’t this be the same in any city? But I admit, it was jarring against the backdrop of those grand neoclassical buildings, that architectural trilogy. And I admit I had my blind spots with this city, a city people either Orientalized or romanticized, two versions of the same sin. Even though it was the city of my birth, perhaps because of it, I was surely guilty of both. There’s no such thing as perfect vision, true, but how to rid oneself of blindness?
As I walked through the last of the traffic I was relieved to be walking alone, moving freely between the cars, up the sidewalks, through the park, and up along the side of Lykavittos, spared most of the mess.
•
Back at home, I went to my balcony. I think I was hoping to find the Captain, but his apartment was quiet. Around ten, I heard his key in the door and soon after I smelled cigarette smoke. I stepped out onto the balcony and waited until he registered my presence. A shift in his seat, a change in the air. Kalispera, Captain.
He returned the greeting. I heard the ice clink in his glass.
When I was a child my mother would pour her first drink immediately after her classes. She’d make me dinner and pick at something herself. My friends’ family dinners were an endless source of fascination. Mothers who ate at the table! Or my best friend’s mother, who always washed dishes while her husband and four girls ate; another lived only with her mother and brother, and after school her brother made us chocolate chip pancakes for dinner as he drank beer from a can. He was seventeen, usually shirtless. I loved him deeply.
“Were you close with your mother?” I asked.
“Very,” the Captain said, as if the forwardness of my question were routine, as if we’d always spoken this way.
“I’m fascinated by people’s mothers. But I was most comfortable in the houses where they felt invisible,” I said. “Or crazy.” As a young girl I had had the sense that it was my duty to take care of my mother, not the other way around.
I heard the Captain exhale. Shift in his chair.
I continued:
“The nights my father was gone, playing bouzouki in Greektown, my mother watched television in the den and drank. Sometimes I confused her cries with those that came from ER on television. I would wander from my room, where I talked on my princess telephone to friends, and stand at the door like a sentry. Sometimes she realized I was there and the cries stopped, the bad dreams. Maybe drunken hallucinations. I don’t know. When my mother began sleeping in that room for good I told my child-self that she liked the television, which my father did not.”
Even then I had known the power and comfort of a good, solid lie.
“Those nights, when she stopped the bizarre mix of conversation and terror-stricken cries she’d have with herself, I was released from my duty. But I never went back to my bedroom. I’d fall asleep in the high-ceilinged living room, watching television—Saturday Night Live or a movie or those ridiculous nighttime soaps that I stupidly loved. In that large room I felt safe on the couch but terrified to move, to pass the den door, afraid my mother would stir from her drunkenness and say something unintelligible or mean. So I’d remain on the couch until my father returned from his nightclub and carried me up to my room.”
The smell of tobacco in his shirt pocket had signaled that I was off duty and could collapse into childhood again.
“My mother never got over leaving Greece,” I said. “She left for my father.” I know now my mother’s excitement for a new life, those last days in Athens, had been a manic state of denial. “Each visit back was painful to her, yet being away was even worse.”
“The scourge of the exile,” the Captain said. “Not being able to forget.”
“My mother existed in two places but lived nowhere, whereas my father existed in two places and lived everywhere.” I am sure my mother had moments of happiness in Chicago, but I don’t remember them. The closest I could remember was when she puttered around in her small rock garden in our yard, or sat in the early autumn sun, reading. On the island, things felt a little better, but I think she was always thinking of the moment she’d have to leave.
The Captain didn’t say anything, but I could feel him listening, as if he’d been listening to me for years. He did not ask many questions, and I liked him for this. It was not aloofness or disinterest. Something else. A sense of space, not distance. It occurred to me right at that moment that everything with my mother had been performance. But pain all the same.
My parents, and me by proxy, were not always aware of two worlds but were always aware of themselves from the perspective of the other one. It seemed that the traits of my personality were always viewed as a product of my Americanness, not my Miraness. For instance, I was nearly always on time. My parents’ sense of time, which I do not attribute to their Greekness but to something else, infuriated me as a child. I was late to school plays, to school, to birthday parties; I was often the last to be picked up. My father would begin lathering his face to shave at the time they were supposed to be at a dinner.
“What time is it there?” my parents would ask a relative when they spoke, as if the rules for time elsewhere moved forward of their own accord, that those eight hours were as arbitrary and changeable as my mother’s moods. The only time they kept sacred was the evening weather report, before which my father would angrily hush any conversation or noise, as if our quiet obedience would ensure the early arrival of spring, and the nightly Lucky Lotto drawings broadcast on WGN.
But their dual identities were clear. When in Greece, they saw things through American eyes, and when in America, through Greek eyes. My father flourished like this. He loved it, he fed off it, he became a larger version of himself. But my mother, I think it slowly killed her. She was displaced in Chicago, and when she was back in Greece she felt a more acute, sad kind of displacement. She didn’t exist fully formed in either place, and she slowly melted away.
Had I said all this out loud, or to myself? I was suddenly sleepy, but when I said goodnight to the Captain and fell into bed, sleep would not come. The bed felt hard, and I tossed and turned, my eyes wide open. But I must have slept eventually because I woke to the sound of a woman’s screams. First I lay there, unsure if I was dreaming. I suppose I’m still not certain—there is a small chance it was a dream, and for many consecutive nights in that apartment I’d awake completely confused. But even as I say as much, I feel my guilty conscience: I could no longer blame the disorientation of jet lag, or even a new space. And because of this I cannot shake the feeling of shame that accompanies this confession: lying in bed, unable to even move my arm to reach for the phone, sheer terror surrounded me as a woman screamed for help. I could have immediately dialed the police, I could have gone out to the balcony and called to her. Maybe even if I had made my presence known, the assailant would have run. Maybe she was with a lover, an episode of violence unfolding right in front of their home.
Her screams for help were clear and deliberate. Voítheia. Help. And they became more frantic, more terrified, more muffled. They were from a living body, they were n
ot my imagination, but I could not move.
Finally, the silence released my limbs and I was able to tear myself out of the bed and onto the balcony. I called the police and explained to them where I was. I called out to her.
But I was too late. The night had swallowed her up.
The next night, I asked the Captain about the screams. Though he slept with his balcony doors open, he said he had not heard a thing. The ship made him a light sleeper, he added. Always ready for an emergency.
“You really heard nothing?” I asked.
“Not even the cats,” he said.
I wasn’t sure where the screams were coming from. Lykavittos? Near the stadium? Sometimes what sounded like music from a party in the next building was coming from the park that was a fifteen-minute walk away. But I know these are excuses that I make because of the helpless shame of lying in my bed, my shoulders pinned down by fear.
“Are you okay?” he asked, finally. “Mira?”
I realized sleep had taken hold in the chair and I’d been dreaming of driving around with large green-and-turquoise sea charts I could not read, trying to place one into my eye like a giant contact lens. I told him this.
He laughed, a deep, gentle laugh. “You remind me that I haven’t paid attention to my dreams. I’m probably having them but my sleep has felt blank.”
“That sounds wonderful. I’m often teaching in my dreams, about to lecture on a subject I know nothing about.”
He was quiet. I wasn’t used to talking to someone who didn’t interrupt each sentence. I continued. “Except suddenly I’m bartending, my boss complaining about the wrong drink, words spilling out of her glass, across the television screens while I fumble with a tiny lock on luggage, or try to dial a phone number.”
“Me, driving a car into the water and sinking; or worse, watching my kids drown and not being able to help them. Of water, of blindness, of rock.”
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