Fady showed up as we were leaving, and the three of us walked. We stopped at a square, lively in the evening, with children running around and adults on benches, having drinks in the cafés, walking with friends. “The sounds in the plateia,” he said, “the shouts of mothers, the squeals of children, the music of the voices. I’ve been recording them everywhere. You go to Berlin, to Paris, to Dublin, to New York: the voices don’t sound this way. But in Gaza, in Cairo, in Aleppo: from afar, I would not be able to tell the difference. Sofia, Thessaloniki, Istanbul: these cities are Balkan. But Athens belongs to the Levant.”
As always, I marveled at the changing light: it is orange, it is gold, it is lavender, it is dusk. Just before the sun disappeared, we stopped in a shop selling leather backpacks, like tourists, then a bouzouki/lute shop whose owner Fady knew, and an eclectic used bookstore with lots of foreign books. We walked through a dark residential area: the neighborhood had been working class, but recently artists and young people and their fancy European strollers had moved in, and in the distance we heard music, saw lights. Another thing I loved about Athens: the way you could move through it on foot, from neighborhood to neighborhood, the night unfolding as you walked.
On the corner was a bar that seemed to glow red, rose, violet. The bar was crowded with people vying to order a drink, but we sat at a tiny table in the corner of the back room, looking out at the bar, the street. To our right was a large window, open into the night. Dimitra and I had Campari and soda, and Fady ordered some variation of a Negroni. Our ice cubes were shaped in the letters of the Greek alphabet.
An eclectic place, self-aware: a small vintage refrigerator was mounted above our heads, an old red bicycle, a transistor radio. Two Italian men next to us—clearly so by their body language—charmed two Greek Australian women. They spoke in English, broken but alive.
Fady eyed them with both envy and marvel. “Here, they’ll also always be expats,” he said. “If you’re from Afghanistan, Iraq—even Bulgaria, Albania. It doesn’t matter: foreign national at best. Migrant. Refugee. Sans-papiers.”
I wasn’t sure if he was talking about himself, or Rami.
“You don’t know how easy you have it,” he said. “The options.”
I didn’t know what to say. His voice was not blistering, nor was he wrong. “You didn’t come here as a refugee,” I said.
“Not here, no. But I was, as a child. You’re aware of the fragility of everything, always. That at any moment it might all implode.”
“And in Germany, for Rami?”
He was quiet, as if I hadn’t spoken, and deep in thought. “But I am a refugee,” he said finally. “I’m not ashamed of it. Why should I be? I’m also a violin maker. And an artist. And a father. Husband. Exile. Many things.”
Dimitra put her hand on his. He shrugged. “Maybe in Germany it will be different,” he said.
I worried. In Germany it might be worse.
10
The Captain
Though I was staying in my father’s house, I still hadn’t seen him. When I’d arrived, I’d found the bed was made; the place looked clean. His dishes—an espresso cup, a saucer, a spoon, some plates and forks and knives—remained in the dish rack. It would not be unlike my father to suddenly meet a woman and disappear. As he got older, though, and as he felt his own relevance slipping away, his disappearances worried me.
I checked the closets for his two small suitcases, hard, light-blue Samsonites that he’d had since the 1970s. Both were there, but his small blue duffel was not. Strangely, I felt some relief seeing them, hoping he was indeed in the hills with Nefeli as the novelist had thought. He did not attend the christening.
Aris did, though, and he invited me for a drink the next day. We agreed to meet at the port, at the café associated with the distillery near our fathers’ village.
There was not much wind now, and the day was warm. I ordered a beer and drank it quickly, eating the pistachios the waitress placed before me. When she brought my second round, she was distracted by someone who had entered. I turned to see what had brightened her so, and there stood Aris. He greeted her politely and then spotted me, moving across the café to join me at the table.
He’d barely had a chance to sit when the waitress reappeared, beaming at Aris, who flirted back at her. He ordered an ouzo, glanced at my beer, and changed his mind. “And would you bring us some more nuts, please.” The waitress seemed happy to fill his request, and had he kindly asked her to unbutton her shirt she would have. He was the type of man who eyed women with that particular aggressive blend of admiration and possession.
I don’t know why I was so angry.
We sat on adjacent sides of the table, so I had a view of the harbor and he had a view of the promenade. Eventually the evening volta would begin. Right now the only people out were the tourists whose skin was least suited to the sun.
We exchanged pleasantries about the christening, about when we’d last been to the island.
“We met when I was a child, you know,” Aris said. “You were visiting for the summer, from university. I remember your Michigan T-shirt: a bright orange with blue letters. When we got home that night I asked my father for a shirt like that.”
This admission startled me. As a young man, I’d admired his father; had even imagined being a writer myself. Now here was Aris with political ambitions. We’d been born to the wrong fathers. Or perhaps there was no difference.
The waitress arrived, gently placing each item on the table, first Aris’s beer, then the frosted glass, then the small dishes of peanuts and olives. He smiled, offered her his studied attention in exchange, as if they had rehearsed their roles in this transaction.
“Katerina didn’t come,” he said.
“Still in Brussels,” I said. “They’ll come for the summer, when the kids finish school.”
Aris poured his beer into his glass. His mentioning of Katerina felt deliberate and loaded. But I was still thinking of the T-shirt. It was more yellow than orange, Michigan’s maize and blue. I had saved it for years. It was probably here, in my father’s house. I remembered that particular summer, the T-shirt, but not Aris the boy.
It was disconcerting to think of him as a child and me as a fully formed adult, the age where children were not even on my radar but I, an older college student, was on his. Did he see his own age in my face? To see us sitting together you wouldn’t think we were a decade apart. I don’t think so anyway, but we never think we look as old as we do; age is something imposed on us. Our inner lives remain the same. Or do they?
“Do you see her often?” Aris asked.
“She and the kids return for holidays, long weekends. Sometimes I go there.”
“I meant Mira,” he said.
I didn’t say anything. I thought of her reach for my arm, grazing her fingers over the exposed ink.
“She hates me,” he added. “Maybe she should.”
“She hasn’t mentioned you.” A punishing line, and with a bit of pleasure I watched it register on his face. What did he want with Mira? He seemed unable to let her go even though he was the one who’d left her. I’d noticed some Mira-isms in his speech, and they irritated me. Things I had picked up too: inserting an English all-purpose “like” into a Greek sentence: “kai eimai like.” I don’t know if he was looking for absolution or information, but sitting near those sailboats, I felt as if I were somehow betraying Mira. I have always thought loyalty a strange thing. We think it has to do with history, with oath, but it is nothing of the sort. It’s an impulse.
Aris then began to recount highlights of my father’s career, as if he were auditioning for the old man through me, or fishing for something I couldn’t see. The truth was that my father’s politics both did and did not concern me. He was always hoping to reenter politics, to find a moment that might make him feel whole again, but now, with his deteriorating mind, I’m sure he understood he could not. A warrior without a war. I did not share this with Aris.
The prev
ious time I’d visited my father here on the island, I’d found on his shelves a memoir by the poet Manolis Anagnostakis, who’d written that the most exciting time of his life was when he was constantly being followed, that any minute he could be arrested and sent away. It gave him meaning. My father had prided himself on being a rebellious, revolutionary voice, yet now no one listened to him at all, let alone saw him as an icon. I had not asked what he thought of the young generation of politicians, but I can imagine: Babies, he’d say, doing their yoga, changing diapers, going to the supermarket. Referring to the men, of course. To him, the women in politics were invisible.
Whether his politics concerned me was irrelevant; I was always in its path. When I was younger he and a group of his allies were involved in some scandal, and that’s when I made my first escape. As far as I could get from Greece without going to the moon. To be off-land, on the other side of the planet, no ground connecting us. To stay at sea somehow, stateless. Rootlessness was my anchor.
“Any advice?” Aris said finally. I knew from his smile and the tone of his voice that he was no longer talking about my father, or politics, that he’d returned to the topic of Mira. Or maybe we’d been talking politics this entire time. “As the son of a politician, that is.”
“Not much different than being the son of a novelist,” I said. “Laundry hanging on the line.” Because my father had been almost a compulsive philanderer, or perhaps despite it, I did not chase women. Or maybe I did. I’m not sure. But with Aris there, I’m ashamed to admit I didn’t care if he thought I was exactly like my father.
Aris looked at me over his tall beer glass, leaned in a bit. “She’s still important to me.”
Was this a confession, a defense, or a threat? I said nothing.
Then the waitress returned and they resumed their outrageous flirting, and when she left the table Aris looked ready to continue our conversation but Eva had appeared, walking toward us in a flowered dress, her hair shiny and clean, well-rested and eager to be with her fiancé again.
I invited her to join us, but Aris stood and said they had plans. We fought over the bill enough to play our roles, but I insisted, kept my hand covering it on the table, and Aris was eventually forced to concede.
After they left, I waved to the waitress, who had disappeared, a bit pouty after Eva’s appearance. I asked for another beer and stared out at the sailboats, the slow, metronomic swaying of their masts.
What I also remember from that summer: I was back from college, and one particular night I came out of a bar near the port and saw my father’s friend Minas with a much younger woman. She was sitting on one of the low walls at the edge of the sea, and he was standing in front of her, running a hand up and down her leg. Braided brown hair, cutoff shorts, a bright-yellow embroidered blouse, turquoise bracelets on her wrists. I was twenty-one, and she was not much older. The jeans were cut so short that the pockets hung out below the hem.
Minas, then with a full head of shiny black hair, held one of those dangling pockets between his thumb and forefinger while the rest of his hand moved underneath. There weren’t many people around, but even had there been they were behaving as if they were completely alone. She playfully moved his hand away, but I could tell that he had put his hand there many times before, made her throw her head back in pleasure. At the time I felt disgusted by him, as I knew and liked his wife, but I thought of that young woman for weeks after that, when I was alone with myself: her heavy eyebrows, her full lips, the long muscles of her legs. A few years later, when Aris’s father had written about two couples and a love affair, Minas had refused to speak to him for over a year, claiming he’d taken details of his life. Minas had thought he and his lover were hiding in plain sight. In reality, they were just in plain sight. Years later, I’d asked Minas about it. “Everyone knows everything,” Minas had said. But what had really surprised him was that Aris’s father had sworn he had not been writing about him. He was, in fact, writing about himself.
I had told Mira about this. She had read the novel. “It’s always the jilted spouse who feels like a fool, but everyone knows they’re the least foolish of the bunch,” she said. Then she was quiet, and I heard her shift in her chair. “I guess the novel absorbs everything around it. But the things we think we see in novels,” she said, “are the ways we want to see ourselves. Besides, are our lives really that original?”
What is in store for any of us besides the sins of our fathers? Sins we run from until we commit them ourselves? Though my father was absolved of any wrongdoing after his political scandal, the shame remains, the shadow around his name. Who stayed loyal to him has shaped his life. I always have acted as though his life was of no consequence to me, but of course it has been what has most shaped me. It was how I was formed. It doesn’t matter that I drifted so far away: he was, he is, like a city hanging on a high cliff, impossible to ignore.
I was tired of all these men behaving as if there were no consequences. I suppose I had been one of them myself.
When I arrived back at the house, sleepy after all the beer, my father was still nowhere to be found. I lay on the bed, flat on my back, replaying the conversation with Aris to myself. I thought of the T-shirt he’d mentioned and jumped up to paw through the old chest of drawers. I kept some clothes here, mostly old things to sleep in or wear to the beach.
Sure enough, there was the shirt. I tried it on. My tattoo, which I didn’t have then, peeked out of my left sleeve, the tentacles of an octopus. I had been skinnier. How much of that young man, before college, before the navy, before children, was still left in me, and what had the child-Aris seen? Did he still see the cocky twenty-year-old kicking a ball around on the beach?
I placed the T-shirt atop the dresser. I intentionally buried old shirts in my drawers so Katerina would not notice and therefore not throw them away. Now I suppose I wouldn’t have to worry about that. All these last moments; my days had become populated by them.
The final months of my time on the Pacific, before I was to marry, I was nearly crippled by last moments. Midwalk through a bustling market in Ho Chi Minh City, I’d think about how I’d never walk through here again, never smell these stalls with those stinky, delicious fruits; these places where I bought fabric for finely tailored shirts that I still own, spending what there would be half a monthly salary. I’d never hear the particular cadence of the language, never sip that strong coffee. I’d probably never again feel the quiet stillness of Kyoto, where no one even used a horn; or pull into the spectacular port of Shanghai. The tenderness of those places for the last time, as touristy as my gaze was, was so crippling that in some ports I could barely leave my cabin. My crew would leave for dinner and I would tell them I did not feel well, that I needed to catch up on work. I fell in love in Casablanca only because, as I realize now, I knew it was a last moment, a traveler from London whose father was Irish and mother was Egyptian. Nothing happened between us, nothing physical, that is, but I even thought about her during my wedding, and when the doctor who delivered the twins had the same corkscrew curls and perfect eyebrows, I could feel it in my groin, the twisting throb of closing opportunities. I felt it again today, like descending deep into the bowels of the ship, the recesses of the engine room, the heavy doors locking shut behind me. Lights out.
•
I dreamt of Aris and Mira, but only Aris’s face was clear. Mira was like a character in a book that I felt I had both vividly imagined yet could not entirely see—long hair, a shoulder, her wrist stacked with bracelets. I was conflating that drink with Aris and that time I saw her in the taverna in Exarcheia. I was imagining her walking by and seeing us there. In my mind I saw Aris get up and chase her through the crowd. I saw his petulance and her anger, then his anger and her petulance. Her lips dry from the heat, her eyes accusatory; the way her cheek still held a faint pink mark. He touched her hair and then her hip and guided her off the path of the street, next to a postcard stand and a kiosk, where she bought a bottle of water, took a long
drink, and wiped her chin and throat with the back of her hand. There was something wild about her, unpredictable. She made no eye contact while he talked. The way he touched her hair before they parted, the way it felt salty and textured, the way her back moved away from him into the crowd.
Of course I hadn’t seen any of this. I had simply imagined it to be true. I’d only seen them interact twice. First, that night at the taverna, when they quickly disappeared behind the grape trellises, into the alley. And again while I watched from my Athens balcony. Yet I remembered these things as if I were recalling his memory. As if I were he. As if I were there.
I quietly went out to my father’s balcony and looked over the valley, lit up by the moon.
11
Mira
Nefeli did not attend her own opening. She did not acknowledge the flowers we sent the morning of, nor did she respond to any of our messages, as though the show she’d worked so hard to complete was not happening at all.
When I arrived at the museum, people were clustered outside—talking, smoking. I found Fady and Dimitra and the kids. Leila had dressed the part of a young artist herself, with her dark glasses, her black clothing. Rami wore pressed jeans and a pressed paisley shirt, a blue sport coat, his hair all messed up with product (Leila, no doubt), and new heavy-framed glasses just like Fady’s.
“Hey, handsome,” I said, and Rami grinned his toothy grin. I took a picture of Fady and Rami, their arms around each other, now looking very seriously at the camera.
On the side of the museum, WELCOME was painted in a dozen languages, which was not part of Nefeli’s installation but provided an interesting juxtaposition—all that earnestness. But her installation comprised a dozen bright-red megaphones, each the height of an old phone booth or a kiosk, which lined the sidewalk in front of the building and then the road. I wasn’t sure what they were constructed of—wooden frames with painted, papier-mâché exteriors, I guessed. They each held a camera to film street activity, projecting the images to a room filled with screens in the gallery. A few other megaphones were installed across the city: near the university, in a square in Petralona, and outside the Victoria train station. These contemporary street images were being juxtaposed with historical news footage. It was a project about surveillance and protest, and also the distortion of time and sound—the manipulation of sound through time. And, as Fady added, the silence of the current moment. The megaphones, whose bells faced the sidewalk, captured images rather than projecting sound.
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