“You don’t know what it’s like here, in this neighborhood, with all the foreigners,” the pharmacist said. I couldn’t tell if she was offering this as an explanation or rebuke, whether she felt what had happened was an unfortunate accident or I’d brought this on myself.
I tried to turn my head, to protest, telling her how they’d tried to force us into the street.
The pharmacist didn’t answer, told me to keep still.
“You’re Greek?” she finally asked.
“What else would we be,” Dimitra snapped. She instinctively put her arm around Rami, whose curiosity or discomfort had brought him back up to the front of the shop.
The pharmacist wouldn’t look at the boy. “You should be helping other Greeks,” she said. She had heard the Arabic, the English.
“Do you have children?” I asked.
“Three boys,” the pharmacist said, rather proudly. I stared at her thick mascara. But then she realized why I was asking her this, finished off the stitches, and didn’t say another word. I hate this way of relating, the way men empathize with rape victims because they have daughters. As if that’s the only way. But shame can shut people up, and at that moment, I wanted to shut her up. I stared at her large dangly earrings, wanted to rip them out of her ears even as she sewed me up.
I walked home fuming. Dimitra had invited me back for lunch but didn’t insist after I politely declined. Rami had closed himself off to us and I could tell Dimitra simply wanted to get him home. To retreat to their family.
I was fumbling for the key to my building when I heard a car door slam shut. There was Aris, stepping out of a new black car parked across the street. Somehow it’d been spared the red Saharan dust that had blanketed the city.
He called to me.
I turned to face him. He wore jeans and a gray T-shirt, hair wet and combed back. “Nice car,” I said. I stood inside the foyer of the building while he stood outside, beneath the awning, the door open between us.
“My God, Mira. What in the world?”
I looked down at my bandaged hands and knees, raised my fingertips to my cheek, feigned nonchalance. “What are you doing here?”
“Alexi and I play basketball together.” Rami and Fady also played basketball. Was everyone in the city playing basketball together? Why had I never noticed this before? This city’s secret network. “We usually have a beer afterward. I was just leaving, about to go, but then I saw you.”
I brought my hand between my eyes and squinted. It hurt my face. I wondered how long he’d actually been sitting in his car, but I was too rattled to be callous. “I’m going upstairs,” I said. “I don’t feel well.”
He touched my cheek. I winced. I’d been given some pain pills but I had taken only half of one, and now I felt loopy and woozy and the pain all at once, as if the smaller dose had given me a random sampling of both pain and numbness.
He followed me inside, and I was too exhausted to argue with him. We waited for the elevator. I did not want the Captain (Alexi? Had he never told me his name?) to hear Aris’s voice, particularly after what happened between us the other night. Whatever that was.
Aris didn’t mention that night at the taverna, the way he had accused me of wanting to pick a fight, cause trouble. All those years together we had never acknowledged a fight. Usually we just fell back into a rhythm. Things never got resolved, but I don’t really believe things ever get resolved. Dissolved, maybe. Even as a child, when people would say something had a happy ending, I didn’t understand. But now what? What happens after the book? The after was always the most interesting thing to me. Now what happens to the people in the book when I’m not reading about them? It was always perplexing.
Endings are false, anyway. Only beginnings ring true.
There of course was a problem. We never really fought, except those first few years we were together in Chicago. We had disagreements; sometimes we’d have misunderstandings. But we were always in a sort of visiting, vacation mode. We never had those difficult conversations.
It was not time to have the conversation we were about to have, but Aris and I had never been good with timing. I pushed the button for the elevator but then grew too impatient to wait for it. Aris was saying something as I turned to take the stairs. But I did not want to talk about our failed relationship now. I raised my hand to stop him from speaking. My cheek throbbed, and the three stitches felt massive, as if they traversed my entire face. I could feel bruises forming, thickening, underneath my skin.
At my apartment door, I could barely get that giant key into the lock. My hands were scraped and bandaged, and in my knee I felt a dull throb.
“Fucking help me, please,” I said. My swearing in English in particular bothered him, though he swore in Greek all the time. I told him once it was a sign of intelligence, but he’d only shrugged. Aris turned the key and we went inside.
“Who did this to you?” he demanded.
“Bar brawl. Soccer match.”
“What match. Come on.”
“Run-in with Nazi thugs.”
“I can’t tell if you’re kidding.”
“I’m fine.”
I felt light-headed and walked out to the balcony, sat down at the little table. I wanted air. Aris didn’t say anything. He placed his hand over mine. I had to fight back tears. It was all too much. I didn’t pull my hand from under Aris’s, but I didn’t look at him either.
“Mira,” he said. “I don’t want to lose you. I never imagined it would happen this way,” he said. At first he wondered himself if he were simply doing the right thing, he said, when Eva got pregnant. “I mean, I have feelings for her.”
“Then why won’t you just let this go?” I asked.
“Because you’re my best friend,” he said.
I told him he was crazy, pulled my hand away, and stood up.
He sighed, deeply. “This is not easy for me.”
“Aris, I think I need to lie down.”
I went inside, lay on the bed. He sat on a chair he’d brought in from the dining room, his head in his hands, as if for the first time aware of our boundaries. “Everything just happened so quickly,” he said. “I had no one to talk to about it.”
Because I was the one he talked to.
I stood up unsteadily from the bed, pushed past him into the bathroom, where I soaked a washcloth and held it against my bruised face. I could hear him outside the door. I leaned into the mirror and examined the black stitches on my cheek.
“Mira.”
He opened the door and I watched him step behind me in the mirror. I turned to face him, propping myself up on the counter. He gently touched my knee, my cheek.
Something came over me then, something dark and devious.
He saw it in my face and I think it turned him on. I opened my legs slightly and he leaned in between them. He placed both hands on my thighs.
Yes, he was about to get married. I want you to know that I knew exactly what I was doing, and it was not an act of tenderness or a searching for some comfort. There was something almost violent about it. I wanted to claim some of him, to leave claw marks on his back and the blood from my cheek on his shirt. I wanted him to go back to wherever he was living now feeling dirty and disloyal, my scent lingering, as if I had my own grief to avenge.
And he wanted it too.
After, Aris walked out to the bedroom balcony—separate from the one off the living room near the Captain’s—and lit a cigarette. I went back to the bathroom. I was convinced that if I turned my head I would see my mother standing beside the tangled bedsheets. I could just about feel her gaze on the back of my neck.
I had to get out of there, and I knew it would be the easiest way to get Aris out too. I had missed lunch at Dimitra and Fady’s and was now starving. “I need to get something to eat,” I told him.
“But I have to go,” he said.
“It doesn’t matter.”
Outside, we stood beside his car. He gave me a long hug and a listless ki
ss on the cheek. As I walked away, his comment echoed from the night I’d seen him at the taverna: We can still have something. Of course I knew what he meant. I never thought that pureness between us, that freshness, what I thought was clean, easy love, could be altered. But I could certainly not have something, despite what had just happened between us.
Down the street was a new, trendy place that sold tiny little burgers out of an Airstream trailer housed inside an art gallery: lamb sliders with fig tapenade and goat cheese; beef with cheddar and bacon, Greek-style with mint and oregano, topped with feta. I sometimes stopped in for a drink, a plate of fries. The owner always smiled at me, small talk, insignificant flirting. Today I sat down, ordered a beer, and ate a plate of five sliders. My mother’s presence was palpable. I suddenly recalled her disdain when I’d come home one evening with a boyfriend and a little bag of hamburgers. It had been Lent, and my mother adhered to her Orthodox fasting, even though she had long before stopped going to church. Now, Easter had already come and gone, yet I could feel her disapproval so strongly that I worried if I turned around I’d see her there again, watching. Instead I licked my fingers, juice dripping down my chin afterward, like some satisfied, wild beast.
•
The next morning, I woke with a memory of the building’s rooftop. I recalled it with such force and clarity that I didn’t bother properly dressing before darting from the apartment, coffee cup in hand. I nearly locked myself out. The Captain was coming up the stairs after his run. If he thought it was strange to find me in pajamas, slippers, coffee sloshing on the floor, he didn’t flinch.
He reached out as if he were going to touch my cheek, but he didn’t, and we froze in that subjunctive, that what-if, for a moment. I looked at his hand because I could not look him in the eyes. I wondered if he knew Aris had waited for me in the car, that he had come up. I wondered if he had heard him smoking on the balcony. If they talked of such things.
“I’m going to the roof,” I said.
“I’ve never been up there,” he said. “Not past the storage closets.”
He followed me up the stairs, and for the first two flights we didn’t say a word. In fact we both seemed to be holding our breath.
On the last flight of stairs he stopped, and I turned to face him for a second. Even like this he was still taller than me. I caught a trace of grapefruit-rose and remembered something I had forgotten. The first time I met him, that first passing in the stairwell, I felt a flash of recognition that we might become lovers. Or a silent, mutual acknowledgment of some universe pulsing between us. It was a split second, like those movie theater ads that played a subliminal clip that had the audience racing to the concession stands for icy sodas and buttery popcorn. It’s why new lovers glowed like neon—that harnessed energy.
“Aris asked me how well I knew you,” he said. “Last night.”
“What did you tell him?”
“I told him the truth.”
The truth. I wondered what the truth of us was.
“He waited for me,” I said.
“Yes, I know.”
Though we had already been talking, though we’d had that little flirtatious interaction, it seemed our friendship truly began when we reached the landing, that moment we shoved open the door to the wash of sunlight. We stood in the middle of the roof together, and when I looked up at him I noticed him eyeing my cheek again.
Finally, he asked point-blank. “Did Aris do that to you?” His straightforwardness shocked me. I wanted to blame Aris for everything, but I laughed, so taken aback was I by the idea. I told him no. After I described what had happened at the pharmacist’s, the Captain’s voice grew thick, heavy. “It is sometimes too much.”
I turned away from him. Someone had brought two small, red beach chairs up to the rooftop, facing Lykavittos. Positioned between them was a Lavazza coffee can, probably as an ashtray.
And there it all was.
Dancing with my mother on this rooftop. The closeness of her cheek against mine, the scorching sun. It is June. How young she is! We are dancing, and she is singing to me a song whose lyrics I only partially remember but whose melody runs through me so clear. I am five. I do not realize she is drunk. Downstairs large suitcases are flung open on the bed, clothes strewn everywhere, and my father is packing. We are leaving for the United States.
“I forgot about this rooftop,” I said now to the Captain. In the sunlight his hair was not nearly black like mine or Aris’s, but light enough that Greeks might call him blond. His eyes, without his glasses in this sunlight, the color of camouflage: brown and green and gray.
“To be honest I’d never thought to look,” he said.
“Sorry again to have asked,” he said of my cheek.
“It’s okay,” I said.
My father busts through the door, onto the roof. He is livid. Though prone to his own rages, he was a gentle man and had, to my knowledge, never hurt my mother. He rarely spanked me, and when he did he cried afterward. My mother and I are facing Lykavittos but we turn our faces back to him. My face looks suddenly stricken, as though I have just realized he is upset, but my mother has her head swung back, her hair spilling down her back, that golden-yellow dress with the embroidery on the sleeves. My father reaches out to take me from her and leaves my mother there on the roof, dancing.
A parapet was now built around the rooftop’s perimeter, which I did not remember. I remember feeling worried she might fall off. How much does she drink a day.
I walked to the chairs but then passed them, to the ledge. The Captain didn’t sit either. Nor did he talk. “I have a lot of memories here,” I said. I turned to face him again.
My mother is on that roof with us, in that yellow dress: drunk, and singing. Another song we used to dance to: I’ll get myself a captain. She’s laughing, throwing her head back, and then she turns to me again and mouths: “He’s married too, koukla.” She turns away and clinks the ice in her drink. Almost empty.
The Captain smelled of fresh sweat, of salt, of the tangy barb of his deodorant. He walked to the edge of the roof, peered over the parapet. He stood like a soccer player at ease: hand on cocked hip. Together we looked up to Lykavittos and down at the city, coming alive under the early-morning sun. The Wednesday laiki was in full swing already, and the shouts of the vendors—cherries, apricots, lettuce—rose up in the air.
He knew I was interested in the histories of these Athens neighborhoods. He told me that when he was a child and would visit his uncle, who lived in the flat he occupies now, the neighborhood was much different. He pointed to the narrow road that ascended the hill and widened as it rose to Lykavittos: one neighbor had goats, he told me. And chickens who began their koukourikou before daybreak.
Very few apartment blocks lined this street then, he continued. “Before you were born, of course,” he added. In fact, if you walked just a block or two down, he said, on the way to Mavili, it was like walking through a tiny village. “I can show you later, if you like,” he said.
Sure, that would be nice, I thought I said. But I guess I didn’t.
“Maybe you want to be alone up here?”
“No,” I said, letting out a weak laugh. Alone? “Not alone. Thank you. I’m done.” I turned to face the door but we were indeed now alone.
He pulled the door open, grinding it against the cement floor. I walked down the stairs ahead of him again, aware of him close behind me, aware of his eyes on my back. My shoulder blades tingled. At our doorways we greeted each other goodbye.
“You sure you’re okay?” he asked.
I nodded. “Didn’t sleep much last night.”
•
Let me return now to that memory of my parents. Right before we moved, nearly thirty-five years ago. So I am five and my father finds my mother and me on the roof and whisks me away, leaving her there with her small green tumbler of something or other. My mother comes back into the kitchen fifteen minutes later, where I’m drawing at the table, a dismissive look on her face. I
feel as though I’ve done something wrong, and I cry all evening. My father’s silence penetrates the house. “She needs to be more careful,” is all he says to me.
This is how I see it still. Like a film.
Or maybe it’s that the truest, most defining moments were captured only in my mind, never film, never digital image. Now we capture everything, walk around with a self-awareness so acute that it becomes a lack of one. Look at me look at me look at me don’t look at me.
You capture so much that nothing of your self will be left.
•
They say that children who are exposed to a language as babies always retain that language. That their brains will respond differently to it than non-native speakers, even if they are not able to understand or speak it as adults. I think of Leila and her ease with three languages, four, even, if you count the French she studies at school. But for her, Arabic and Greek will be forever imprinted, the way I suppose Greek is imprinted for me.
Maybe it’s the same for places. I remembered very little about this apartment, and I wonder if what I do remember has come from pictures, or if what I remember has come from memories, but there are a few stark, vivid images that remain lodged in my mind. When I had shut the door behind me that morning, despite the earlier unpleasant memory, holding my coffee that had grown cold, I felt oddly impervious.
A few days after that incident on the roof—not with the Captain but the childhood incident with my parents—my grandmother scrubbed the hell out of the kitchen with Ajax. My parents were busy packing. I was in the courtyard with my grandfather, and I don’t know why—maybe I had to use the bathroom or wanted something to eat—but we were coming back inside. Whatever the reason, I remember it was a sudden decision.
My mother was sprawled out on the staircase landing: blue dress, brown clogs, one of which had fallen from her foot and down a few more stairs. On the cool marble, my father held her head while my grandmother wiped her face with a towel. There was so much blood. And this: my mother was laughing.
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