Scorpionfish

  My brother had spoken to our father the previous week, he said. He’d mentioned elections, which at first my brother had taken as picking a fight, but it was clear he was not talking about recent or upcoming elections, not in Greece and not in the United States, and my brother had let it go. My father also mentioned helping Nefeli with a project, and my brother didn’t know what he was talking about. “Neither did I,” I said. But what really worried my brother was that my father had asked about the twins, and when my brother said, “No, the twins are Alexi’s,” he’d replied, “Yes, of course. The babies.”

  “They’re not babies, Baba,” my brother had said. “The twins are nine, and my sons are in college.”

  Our father had laughed. “Obviously,” he’d said. “I still think of them all as babies.”

  “Something felt off,” my brother said. “Anyway.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “And how are the boys?”

  He exhaled loudly, a habit from his earlier smoking days, now a sign of distress. “They’re well,” he said. “Both have girlfriends.” I knew he meant this as some sort of marker of normalcy.

  My brother often seemed irritated with his kids, which always baffled me. Last August, when they’d traveled to Crete with several friends, I invited them to come aboard the ship. They flew instead, but when we docked there I met them in Chania for lunch. I hadn’t seen them in several years, and I was expecting arrogant young men with an American sense of superiority. But my nephews were laid back and very sincere. We drank beer together at the old port, sitting in fluffy white chairs, the two of them facing the water. They asked about the twins, about Katerina. They were concerned about the current situation, whether I had encountered smugglers or distressed refugees, whether I’d experienced anything firsthand while at sea. I thought of the dense network of shipping and warehouses, leather jackets from China, racks of cheap clothing that will end up on street markets in Skopje and Tirana and Plovdiv. Illegal stuff: heroin, hash, cocaine. Guns guns guns. Contraband and counterfeit cigarettes. And, of course, people: human traffickers moving bodies across the Aegean, across the Adriatic, into Italy and beyond. Or dropping them off on Crete’s south shores and calling it Italy. I had only wanted to counteract some of that, inject some humanity into the inevitable process of migration.

  But I’d lied and told them no, asked about their father.

  They looked at me from over their large beer mugs. I could see my brother in them both—heavy brows; wide-set, nearly black eyes like our mother—but how my brother had produced such polite, open-minded boys was beyond me. One studied public policy at the University of Michigan, and, get this, minored in Modern Greek Studies. My brother had told me this on the phone, going through the faculty lists and reading out their research interests with scorn. “And our tax dollars pay for this shit,” he said. I could not reconcile the brother I knew with his disdain for the uneducated, with this attitude. But me, I was impressed with what my nephew was reading, what he knew of recent Greek history. And he was delighted, and slightly baffled, that I’d studied with the same Shakespeare professor decades before. His Greek was correct and elegant, with only a trace of an accent.

  My other nephew was pre-med at Ohio State. When I asked him what sort of doctor he’d like to be, he said he’d told his father he’d like to be a surgeon. His brother laughed. They were at such ease with each other, the biggest rift between them their college rivalry, their kindness the most foreign thing about them. He wants to be a personal trainer. That’s what he told me. That my brother would kill him if he knew. “It’s never enough for him,” the younger one said. “And it never will be,” his older brother said. “Just like your grandfather,” I added, and they shrugged, a what can you do. They took a selfie of the three of us and each sent it off to their girlfriends. They invited me out the following night to meet their friends, but I was leaving with the ship the next day. I paid our bill, they thanked me several times, and I went back to work.

  A few days later, I was asked by a commanding officer at the shipping company, a man I’d known and liked for years, to leave my post. I was being suspended. And I did not react well. I lost my temper, grabbed his shirt before catching myself and letting go. I had not acted out physically in a very long time, not since I was in my twenties, those years after my mother’s death when even a brush of wind could send me into a rage. When I remember the startled fear on his face I’m filled with shame. He could have pressed charges, called security, reported this, too, to the International Maritime Organization, but instead he calmly told me to gather my things and vacate my cabin. But my fury, shocking to him, was terrifying to me. Later, I called him to apologize for my anger. “It’s a hard time for all of us,” he said.

  But there are protocols. My case, complicated as it is, is under review, and though I’m not ready to talk about it I’ll say a few things. I may go into early retirement. Instead of following marine law I took things into my own hands. I suppose I wanted to be a hero. The company is sympathetic but I could have handled things differently, I know. This, the obligation of the office of the captain, hits all aspects of my life. I’m not saying I always honor my obligations. But they are there, and I always feel them. Maybe that’s why I’m having so much trouble accepting Katerina’s desire to split.

  My brother knew none of this, and I probably won’t ever tell him. It upsets me, talking of these things. One can only move forward, or try.

  Despite his worry about our father, he was in good spirits. I asked him if he’d visit this summer and he grew quiet, said he didn’t have the time, but he’d try to come soon. I knew he would not. While his first wife, the boys’ mother, had fallen so in love with the place and the language, his second wife was less enthusiastic. Seeing Greece through her eyes has given my brother a renewed disdain for it. Their first and only visit was a disaster. She ordered iced tea at dinner, and when the tavernas did not have it she took it as a personal affront. She viewed everything in Athens as though it might be contaminated, was afraid to drink the water, to eat any fruit, to ride the train. She wiped down every surface with little wet cloths she kept in her purse. I wanted to tell him that now she could order any sort of iced tea, that there were organic juice bars and teahouses and vegan restaurants, but I knew that would not be enough.

  “Go to the island, see if he’s okay,” my brother said. This surprised me. He had always exhibited such contempt for our father, but I suppose it was an inverse sort of guilt disguised as resentment. Me, I was the opposite, masking resentment with guilt.

  I told him I was going soon for a christening, and we hung up.

  Whereas my brother has always been on the offensive with our father, I am forever on the defense. What surprised me most was the disgust my father had expressed, when I was younger, regarding my decision to stay at sea. You’re escaping, you’re running away, and this to him was unacceptable. Get a job closer to home. Get a job on land. Our relationship had always been difficult—as a teenager I’d confronted him about his infidelities—so to see him take on the persona of a virtuous family man filled me with a mix of sadness and rage.

  But the thing is, he did see himself as a family man, one who never abandoned his wife and children. Not for the love of another woman, not for a sense of independence. In this way he saw himself as loyal, as sacrificing other lives for the one he’d first chosen. To him it was the way of the world, the world of men, and he maintained both a fierce no one will tell me what to do attitude along with a deep sense of obligation.

  Despite our differences, we share a nostalgia for the future—a dangerous, optimistic longing for what could be. It’s what kept him in politics and what has kept me afloat.

  6

  Mira

  Those first weeks I was in Athens, Nefeli, working hard for her opening, sometimes behaved the way she had that night out with Fady and Dimitra—unagitated, full of warmth. Other times, she acted strangely, as she had that day at the beach, speaking in non sequiturs or circles. Ira
scible. From time to time she was uncharacteristically quiet. Sometimes she stayed up all night in her studio, but it wasn’t until after her show opened that I really began to worry.

  But until the opening, when she wanted a break from working, I’d meet her at the new coffee shop several blocks from her studio, the one with the goat logo. I was calmed by the minimalist space, even its unapologetic trendiness, and when I walked in with Nefeli the baristas’ faces lit up. I’d never seen her studio, which was in an old building that she and a few other artists used as a workspace. It was too private, she said, like offering a glimpse into the mechanisms of her mind. Only Fady had been there, but she made him promise not to utter a word about the project. Her reticence was born less of self-importance than it was of superstition.

  But that morning, Nefeli had asked me to meet her at her studio. She had a few things she wanted to bring and needed help carrying them. I’d woken late, so I hurriedly dressed and stopped at my corner bakery for a coffee to drink on the way. It was one of my true Americanisms, walking through the city with a drink, which drove Nefeli crazy. I loved Athens in the morning: the way the early light hits the streets, the scent of butter and sugar from the bakeries, the crowded coffee shops with the lively chatter and the smell of smoke.

  Nefeli’s studio was not far from the small experimental theater on Mavromichali, past the old movie house, past her favorite taverna, and fairly close to her apartment. Most of the homes were old beauties, some bright and well-kept and others in various stages of disrepair. One seemed like it had been burned in a fire, and the next was fit for a magazine photo shoot. Nefeli’s building, though, was a large, three-story, gray corner structure I had walked by many times, noticing it mostly for the interesting street art that covered the walls: black-and-white Soviet-style drawings. On another wall was some stenciling: DEAR CAPITALISM, IT’S NOT YOU, IT’S ME. JUST KIDDING, IT’S YOU. IT’S OVER. The front door was huge, industrial, like you’d find at a loading dock, and I rang the bell twice. I wandered around the corner to see if there was another entrance; on the side of the building someone had spray-painted, in Greek: NO HOPE. And below that, in English: FUCK MY DESIRE.

  From the open window on the top floor I could hear music, and finally Nefeli came out to the small balcony and said she’d buzz me in. Her face was bright; creating something, to her, was the antidote to despair, and no matter what else was going on, when she was working, she glowed. There were two doors on the bottom floor: one was a dance studio, and the other door was unmarked. When I reached the third-floor landing, Nefeli was standing in front of her door. She wore baggy jeans and a white T-shirt, her hair pulled back in a blue scarf.

  “No peeking,” she said, deliberately leaving the door open a crack so I could. She was in good spirits. The ceilings were high, and the space was huge. Behind her was a large table, scattered on it dozens of little blue scorpions, ceramic, with distorted limbs. I found them disconcerting. She slipped behind another dividing wall, which was where she was building the components of the installation, and emerged in a clean shirt, holding overflowing tote bags. She handed me one filled with school supplies and another with flip-flops in various sizes and colors.

  The squat, as Nefeli and Fady and Dimitra referred to it, as well as those living there, was not far from the studio. It was an abandoned school turned into housing for recent arrivals, a cooperation between the refugees themselves, mostly from Afghanistan, Syria, and Iraq, and local anarchists and activists, depending on whom you asked. Nefeli was proud of the work being done there, and she wanted to show it to me. She thought it would be useful for my new project—one I admittedly had not yet started—on grassroots organizing from the eighties until now.

  From the outside of the school, the tall cement walls, the steps going up, you’d imagine it to be filled with the voices of schoolchildren, which it was. Nefeli led me into the courtyard, where we were met by Nadine, an animated young woman dressed in various shades of mauve and plum, perfect eyebrows. That summer everyone’s eyebrows seemed full and alive.

  She clapped her hands together and smiled when she saw the bags of notebooks, the packets of blue Bic pens, the colored pencils, the markers for a dry-erase board. Nefeli quickly introduced us and took some of the materials and disappeared behind a door off the courtyard, where she ran a drawing class for teenagers and adults. In another room off the courtyard a meeting was in progress: men and women discussing, in English, the labor rights of immigrants and refugees, and a man stood in front of the room, interpreting. Later that night, Nadine said, the room would be used for a dance class. Through the window of another room I could see children from the ages of eight to twelve settling in to the desks: these were children who, most of them recent arrivals, had not yet been enrolled in Greek schools. The first lesson of the day, according to Nadine, would start soon: math. One girl sat on a bench, reading, while another behind her braided her hair. A third sat at the desk, vigorously erasing something in her notebook.

  Nearby, some women sat on a blanket, holding toddlers. One younger woman painted the nails of another, and on a nearby bench an older woman read a novel, holding it at arm’s length.

  From across the courtyard a lanky older boy approached us. He held an infant no more than a year old, dressed in a pressed white oxford shirt, little blue shorts, and light-blue socks, his eyelashes like giant fans. In this new context it took me a moment to register that the older boy was Rami. He smiled, a big toothy grin, recognizing me from the other night. Because he was not in school, Dimitra had arranged various homeschool options for him. During his off-hours he came here with Fady or Dimitra, helping with this and that: acting as a babysitter, even a translator for the younger kids, or disappearing into the corridors with the older boys, which made Fady nervous, but Dimitra insisted he’d be fine. Rami’s spoken English was already excellent, and next week we’d start writing lessons together, per Dimitra’s request.

  The men at the squat were virtually absent, but the older boys, some nearly young men themselves, hung out in the back of the courtyard, away from the women and the children, and though Rami looked young for his age, at least to me, I could tell now that he was more one of them than he was of the kids who sprawled across blankets, drawing pictures and making crafts, writing with bright-colored chalk, waiting for their morning lessons to begin. Perhaps these kids were used to strangers dropping in as volunteers, and they eyed me shyly.

  Rami watched, too, holding the baby facing out. He kicked his chubby legs and looked around the courtyard agreeably, as if taking in any new place, as if he’d just been dressed up one morning on his way to a family wedding and, by some glitch in time and space, ended up here. Which was about right. “Do you want him?” Rami asked, now extending him in front of me.

  The little boy laughed when I took him in my arms, looking back toward Rami with a calm, taciturn expression. Rami put his hand on his hip, proud of himself. “He likes to see out,” Rami explained.

  “You’re a natural,” I told him, shifting the boy around. Rami said a few words to him in Arabic and he smiled, and then I began to whisper a little Greek rhyme in his ear and he remained transfixed. “I’m going to join my friends now,” Rami politely said, “but maybe I’ll see you soon?” I nodded and he disappeared with the others, all of them too old for that first class, I guessed.

  The little boy stayed on my hip, happily looking around, but suddenly I felt ridiculous. What, exactly, was I doing there? Whose child was this? When I’d gone to places where I did not belong, as ethnographer, I allowed myself a certain sense of entitlement, however misguided or false it may have been. I allowed myself that sort of deep hanging out that my work entailed. But just as myself, as Nefeli’s tagalong, I felt like an intruder. Then a young woman in chic dark jeans and a blue blouse, a blue paisley headscarf, hurried over to me and gently took the boy back in her arms, thanking me in Greek. Only then, seeing his mother’s distress at temporarily losing track of him, did he burst into tears. Bu
t soon he was giggling again, shrieking with joy. She kissed his nose and, along with two other women and a little girl wearing a pink backpack, disappeared out the front door, on their way somewhere else.

  After Nadine opened the door of the classroom and called to the children, who stood to join her, the courtyard grew fairly quiet. I went to find Nefeli. I peered into her classroom but she was not there. I opened the door and saw the tote bags. A young man with dark, curly hair sat at a desk alone, writing in a small black notebook. “I’m sorry to disturb you,” I said, in English, and asked where Nefeli was. He shrugged and said he didn’t know.

  It seemed wrong to walk down the corridors—families lived in classrooms. I walked to the front of the building to see if Nefeli was there and instead ran into Dimitra, who was rushing in to pick up Rami. She was surprised to see me and greeted me warmly. “But where is Nefeli?” she asked. “I tried to call her but she didn’t pick up.”

  On the walk home, we stopped outside her studio and rang the bell. Another woman answered, her jeans covered in paint, and said she hadn’t seen her. As we continued up the street, I turned back and spotted Nefeli on her studio’s balcony, her hand up to her forehead, blocking the sun and watching us walk away. A few minutes later, she replied: Sorry, M. Class actually tomorrow. Forgot you had come with me.

  Earlier, I’d asked her about her show: a huge undertaking, both new, never-before-seen installation work—which was what Fady was helping her with as a sound engineer—and a retrospective of her paintings. The latter she described the way one would talk about shedding skin; though the foundation of her career had been in canvas, her new three-dimensional projects were what she was currently most engaged in. Yet she didn’t see this transition as leaving one medium behind for another. This was the reason for the mixed show. What she wanted, she said, was to allow time to fold in on itself.