I was quiet, trying to imagine his kids. Twins.
“I’ve never told that to anyone,” he said.
“Terrifying.” The woman and her scream came back to me. But it had not been a dream. “So hard to explain.” I paused. “‘A dream cannot exist in words.’”
“Is that—”
“From Maria Nephele,” I said.
“Elytis.” He seemed disappointed. Elytis bored him, he said. The sun, the sea, we get it. He spoke a bit more but I felt drowsy, suddenly sleepy.
Later, I woke draped with a white blanket that was not mine and a vague image of him handing the blanket to me, a quick glimpse of his face. I rose from my chair, went inside, and flopped down onto my bed, feeling an odd rush of euphoria.
4
Mira
The next evening I went to Fady and Dimitra’s for dinner. When I arrived at their place, Fady shouted down the staircase excitedly as he heard me walking up, and when I appeared on the landing he threw his hands into the air. He was wearing an apron printed with blue fish, holding a wooden spoon.
“Cute outfit,” I said, and he and Dimitra pulled me in close for kisses and a hug.
“I never liked him anyway,” Fady whispered. I laughed, knowing that of course he had liked Aris; they were friends, but there was a tenderness in the comment. Dimitra never quite trusted him, didn’t find him believable—another neoliberal in a leather jacket pretending to be a progressive—and I didn’t feel like arguing about something I had lost faith in myself. What Aris wanted, Dimitra posited, was for people he didn’t know to adore him. Nefeli, on the other hand, had simply tolerated him, having known him since he was a petulant child. Aris and Nefeli had always approached each other with a slightly proprietary arrogance, and I long ago had given up trying to have them be friends.
I handed Dimitra a bottle of wine, some flowers. She set them down and took both of my hands, looking into my eyes a long time, as if trying to say something. She had big honey-colored curls and a contrasting cool demeanor; she loved wine and was able to turn anything into a brainy conversation. When they welcomed me in, I made my way around the boxes that jam-packed the foyer. Dimitra told me they were Arabic-language books for the refugee camps and the various squats in Athens.
If my parents were my connection to a nostalgic Athens, and Aris to an ideal one, then Nefeli and Fady and Dimitra were my connection to the present moment, a guide to a reality of this city that, as the American journalist Kevin Andrews had written decades earlier, was both the most intense and the least visible. I had known them all for years. Though Fady was a violin maker by craft, he also worked as an interpreter, with his connections to both speakers of Arabic and Dari. Fady had lived in Athens since he was in his twenties. His small workshop, which he used to live and work in, is at Plateia Mavili. If we wanted, Dimitra often joked, we could throw Molotov cocktails from his workshop balcony to the US embassy.
When I spoke to Dimitra earlier, she had told me Fady was out, taking a Syrian family to the asylum office, and about the absurd system they’d had to navigate to get the appointment. She told me about unaccompanied minors, refugee kids selling themselves in the park. A father with toddlers, his wife who had made it with their infant girl to Germany. Two separate boats, one stopped by authorities, one let go. The blurring lines: the volunteer agencies doing more than the NGOs, the journalists becoming volunteers, the refugees themselves organizing better than any government agency—at least the ones in Athens, not those isolated in festering, overcrowded camps on the peripheries.
While everyone else in Athens was struggling financially, Fady and Dimitra squeaked by. They’d been better off years before, of course, but they were still afloat. By Greek standards, anyway. Fady’s hypothesis: if people had money, they were investing in expensive things like instruments, and a lot of his business came from the better-off countries of Europe. They lived in a bizarrely large flat for an even more bizarrely low rent on the border of Neapoli and Exarcheia, about a ten-minute walk from my place. Dimitra also owned a small but gleaming apartment in the center that she rented on Airbnb for three times the price of their own. A necessary evil, she said, knowing the way it drove rents up. The taxes on it, in addition, were terrible.
Fady hated idleness: he was either building a cello or restringing a violin or working as a freelance interpreter. He was incredibly skilled at video editing and had worked with friends on a documentary; he was friends with the Balinese graffiti artist and the Greek Argentinian singer and the aging, slightly deranged leftist composer. He knew everyone. His hobby of sound art was becoming a second career. He and Nefeli were working together on her new installation, part of her upcoming show, though I didn’t yet know its details. My point: you would never call Fady and find him binge-watching a television series or sucked into social media. Dimitra was a freelance journalist and a gorgeous singer. When up for it, she sang in a few little bars across the city.
People often came to Dimitra and Fady when going through a tough time—just last month they’d had two friends, journalists from Ankara who no longer felt safe there, staying in the guest bedroom. They helped them settle in Athens, and when Dimitra told me the story, introduced us, I recalled the way she and Fady, and a tiny Leila, had taken me to the new IKEA to make sure I had a proper desk, a comfortable living space, in that small flat I’d rented in Pangrati as a grad student. Leila still had the stuffed giraffe I’d bought for her then, flopped over her dresser. Days later, when I had attempted to build the desk, filled with white-hot rage as I stared at a diagram instructing me to get onto a diving board, Dimitra came over and we put it together within an hour. Being with them always calmed me down.
“Nefeli’s not with you?” Dimitra asked, going back to the door, which was still open, peering into the stairwell as if she were about to tell me a secret. I, too, wanted to tell her about that strange afternoon at the sea, but the doorbell rang and they buzzed her up. When Nefeli reached the landing and smiled, looking refreshed and rested, I relaxed.
The traffic and commotion of our arrival summoned Leila. It had been two years since I’d seen her, and I almost did not recognize the teenager before me: her dark, shiny hair piled messily high atop her head, black leggings, black T-shirt, black-rimmed glasses like Fady’s, black Ugg boots. When she was younger, she would come flying around the corner and throw herself onto me for a hug, her arms wrapped around my waist. She’d lost her youthful gregariousness and now shared Dimitra’s unnerving demeanor, which on a near-child was almost disarming.
But I insisted on a hug and she stepped toward my open arms. Pulling her toward me, I spotted a younger boy—though at this age it was hard to tell—standing in the space she’d just occupied, and I knew this must be Rami. Rami had arrived last fall, alone, from Damascus; his father and Fady had been childhood friends, and he’d managed to make it to Athens and reach Dimitra and Fady there. He should have been in a Greek school by now, but some snafu with paperwork, with the bureaucratic maze, had delayed his enrollment. Dimitra had told me he wanted to be a writer and had asked, over the phone, if I’d consider tutoring him. I’d happily agreed. Rami had relatives in Germany, an uncle and aunt and cousins whom he missed dearly, and an older brother too, who’d taken it upon himself to leave first. When they’d left, Rami’s parents had still been alive. As I understood it, unaccompanied minors were able to apply for reunification with family elsewhere. Yet ushering this long and arduous process along was another story, and it seemed the rules were always changing. And so he waited. I knew Dimitra and Fady loved him deeply, said they’d be happy to have him stay forever, but it was complicated: Rami’s aunt—his father’s cousin—and Rami’s brother were already waiting for him in Berlin.
In the meantime, Rami had spent two months at the American school with Leila; the teacher was a friend of Dimitra’s and had looked the other way. But when some of the parents found out he wasn’t officially registered they threw a fit.
So aggressively denying
one child, can you imagine?
I released Leila, and as she withdrew from my embrace she caught my gaze.
“My cousin,” Leila said warmly, gesturing toward the boy, though I knew not actually. Rami smiled shyly and nodded, then he and Leila scampered back into the den to continue their game, children again. Fady called after them in Arabic, and Dimitra in Greek, and Leila called back, “I know I know,” in English.
This had been the linguistic landscape of my childhood neighborhood in Chicago: those first- or second-generation trilingual households of likely and unlikely combinations, children toggling between languages without hesitation. But Leila would be one of those international, cosmopolitan kids I’d known in college, global citizens more than anything else. I had not been this way; I had been only an immigrant, there was nothing cosmopolitan about my experience, and if there had been it was by mistake.
Dimitra mentioned that a friend of hers, an acquaintance of mine, had seen me in the cheese shop in my neighborhood. He wasn’t sure if it was me so he didn’t say hello, but this rattled me. For some reason I had been moving through Athens with the sense that I was invisible, that somehow, without Aris, without my parents, I had lost the definition of my physical self. That I was somehow deconstructing and recomposing myself all at once.
I never imagined I’d allow a man, or any relationship, to define me, yet I’d allowed it to happen anyway. I’d told this to Fady once, and he had shrugged and said, “But why not? What’s wrong with being defined by love?”
As the dinner neared its conclusion, we decided to skip the dessert, some tiny cheesecakes Nefeli had brought from the sweet shop, and head to the nearby bar where Dimitra would sing. Table cleared, we gathered coats and shoes to leave. I watched Fady pull on a quilted down jacket, as if we were in Chicago. “What?” he said, laughing. We walked out, my parea dressed for snow and I for the beach. Yet when I wrapped my cardigan close around me, Nefeli caught me: “You see?” she said, laughing, and pulled an extra scarf for me from her bag like a magician.
Dimitra was the singer but it was Nefeli who began belting out Kazantzidis as we strolled outside, before we’d even reached the bar. “Life has two doors,” she sang, and this—along with the abundant wine we’d already drunk, despite the pain of the song—put us all in one of those open moods, a heightened emotional state. Rami and Leila, who’d disappeared as soon as they’d finished eating, peered down from the balcony and watched with amusement, as if we adults were a spectacle of entertainment. Nefeli stretched her arms out and moved in a circle, and Leila and Rami, with smirking irony, began to clap for her from above. But me, I felt so full of raw emotion and pain and sadness I could have burst. Later, when Nefeli was gone, I tried to remember her at that moment. Watching her sing this song as if her life depended on it, I could have ripped my heart from my chest and flung it to the ground as if it were a plate.
•
The bar was small and cozy, the walls painted orange and red, the bar and its stools a deep golden yellow. Small black tables and chairs, with an eclectic mix of glasses and plates, as if everyone in the bar had raided their yiayia’s china cabinets to assemble the tableware. The wall that faced the street was made of windows, drawn open onto the outdoor patio that was dotted with heat lamps. We sat inside, closest to the windows and the musicians. Dimitra’s speaking voice was rather low, but her singing voice had an impressive range: clear and feminine and sonorous, with a striking degree of pain. A female Kazantzidis, Fady always said. He, like Kazantzidis, considered Western music rootless. Jazz? Dimitra would ask him. Blues? He remained unconvinced. “You make violins, Fady,” she’d say. But it was Dimitra who was the purist, and Fady’d fallen in love with Greek music—all of it, Kazantzidis especially, with his focus on xenitia and exile, loss—when he fell in love with Dimitra at university years ago.
A strange comparison, maybe, but you’d understand the moment Dimitra parted her lips. A clear, intense depth, like water you could look deep into and see your feet, the urchins below, the small details on the fish swimming by.
I watched the bouzouki player, only half our age but playing like my father had, his cigarette held between his pinkie and ring finger, and I could feel the hot familiar swell of anxiety in my chest. Dimitra had little patience for anything even relatively new. She and my father were similar that way. But beyond his aversions and his predilections—Greek coffee, early-morning walks, elegant wool sweaters, old rebetika—I had hardly known the man at all. I know he had had deep pain, that the pain of exile for him was so intense that he suppressed it entirely. It was why Greek music made him so emotional, made him weep.
But I don’t mean to sentimentalize him. We are harder on mothers than on fathers, who simply need to show up once in a while, cook us an egg. My father used to call me when I was in college, early, always on the landline—how strange now, a landline, though I had one here in this apartment—to see if I was awake and sleeping at home. He timed it just right: too early for me to already be out for class, but late enough to make sure I was not sleeping in. Seven thirty a.m., on his way to work. It didn’t matter if I was out until two studying, or at a party, or when I had worked at a bar and didn’t return home until three or four in the morning. He believed in what he called “normal” hours, and anything else was a sign of weakness, laziness, or defeat.
And he was hard on me. A 97 percent had him asking for the other three points, and when he was angry at me he could give me the silent treatment to end all silent treatments. But he was also, as they say, a hazobabas. He spoiled me.
Fady was asking something I didn’t hear. He was a good man, warm and reliable and generous, and Dimitra and Fady’s relationship always impressed me. They balanced one another; Dimitra always cool yet wildly spontaneous, and Fady more warm and open but with a measured accuracy to his behavior. Despite the years together, two decades, it was fresh, energetic, not bogged down by suburban lethargy or middle-age malaise. Leila became a part of their life, integrated in, as opposed to her becoming what their life revolved around. Make no mistake, though: Fady was besotted with his little girl, and now with Rami too, the three of them shooting baskets in the evenings in the park around the corner, or going to the Saturday market together to decide what to cook. They were fluid in that way, always open for something new.
Though I saw it as the ideal, I couldn’t bring myself to attempt it; I’m more comfortable as a guest outside the family unit than as a member of it. Or maybe I craved a more capacious definition of family. Fady said my name again.
Next to us, a table of drunk and beautiful young actors from the National Theater sang along with Dimitra’s version of “Trele Tsigane,” one of my favorites. Nefeli sat up in her chair, alert, and she touched Fady’s hand.
Then I turned to the street and there was Aris. He was walking past us, in a group. What was he doing in this neighborhood? We had come here together in the past, to this bar to hear Dimitra sing, and to the taverna next door, but lately he preferred posher neighborhoods, less fraught with political agitation. I downed my drink and reached for the little pitcher of raki.
I wanted to stand—partly to verify that it was truly him, and partly to mark this territory as mine after finally being able to imagine myself doing so—but I forced myself to sit through the rest of the song. When the musicians took a break, however, I left Fady and Nefeli and Dimitra talking with some others and excused myself to the restroom. My curiosity was bold and drunk and I found myself, stupidly, marching to the taverna. Sam, our usual waiter—a tall, cute, Eritrean guy—smiled and pointed to the table in the back, where I usually sat with my friends and where Aris now sat with his group.
That’s when Aris looked up. I tried to catch a glimpse of Eva, how could I not, looking as I’d remembered her from movies. Long wavy hair, blonde highlights, large hoop earrings, red lipstick. Then I caught the eye of one of her friends—blue blouse, hair piled atop her head, dramatic dark eyebrows arched, alert. A parade of women marched th
rough my mind, women who’d blatantly flirt with Aris at this or that event, me by his side. Had Eva been one of them?
Then a man raised his hand, a solid, unmoving wave. The Captain. All this made it all the more disorienting, and Aris probably saw that in my face. Looking terrified, Aris gestured for me to wait as I turned and walked back out to the street, where he soon caught up with me. I led us into the small alley behind the taverna. Aris took both my hands in his, in what first seemed a gesture of affection but I quickly realized was one of restraint.
If I thought I had detected some anguish at his first glance, I was wrong; the fear on his face that I’d make a scene shot rage and shame through me. But when have I been the type of woman to make a scene? My mother had made scenes, spontaneous outbursts in department stores, inexplicable road rage, irrational anger about a mistake on a phone bill or a bank statement, drunken displays at parties or just from the front porch.
He let go of my hands. I had once loved the way he’d looked at me, but over the past few years his gaze had begun to feel slightly more judgmental than appreciative: his awareness of what I wore, how smoothly I styled my hair, was my dress right, became my awareness too. It’s not that he was critical, but I was certainly scrutinized. Or maybe it was my perception of his gaze that changed. Our breakup thrust me into an Athens I now navigated in my jeans and boots and sweaters, free of any sort of false trappings, makeup, any sort of disingenuous performance. The breakup, the online photos: they all felt abstract. But seeing them—him and Eva—out together, another night with friends: that was when it hit.
The din from the taverna seemed louder, more boisterous. People milled around the street now, smoking, some in front of the bar where Dimitra was singing. I could hear her going into another of my favorites. Down the middle of the street a group of teenagers walked by, dressed in torn black clothing, followed by a group of German tourists, mostly women in their sixties in colorful T-shirts, taking the teens’ photo from behind.
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