Scorpionfish

  Wandering along the line of megaphones, weaving between the guests with their cocktails, I wondered who was watching us inside. What moment in history this moment of mine was superimposed upon. Somewhere within the museum I wandered through time.

  The gallery inside was crowded as well, and despite Nefeli’s absence, the mood was celebratory. But we kept watching the door for her. Leila and Rami drifted ahead of us as Fady and Dimitra reintroduced me to several of their friends. As I watched Rami walk away, I noticed the worry beads in his back pocket.

  Eventually I drifted away from the conversation myself. In the corner of one of the rooms stood a gaggle of young artists who were in love with Nefeli; the church paintings on the island where she was exiled as a student during the junta had recently gained a small cultlike status. One was a self-portrait that Leila stood in front of, studying. “You can’t do a self-portrait until you’re fifty,” Nefeli had always told me, though she admitted to many in her early career. Acts of self-involvement, she said, rather than self-assertion. Here, the eyebrows on Nefeli’s face were blue, and when you looked closely you could see they were actually scorpions.

  In another room were the soundscapes Fady had worked on with Nefeli, which activated when you walked through the seemingly empty room, though in some places the sounds were distinct and in others they were overlaid—something about cones of sound. I found Rami here, wandering slowly back and forth, and together we listened to the sounds of laughter and children playing and the tinny calls of the paliatzís, the shouts of men in the laiki. High heels tapping on marble, the screech and rumble of the metro. Chants of protesters and chants of the liturgy.

  After an hour or so, Fady and Dimitra said they were ready to leave—the kids had homework—but I lingered. I suppose I had begun to feel an anxiety about Nefeli’s absence, still hoping she’d make a late appearance, knowing deep down, of course, that she wouldn’t. I walked back through the gallery a few times, particularly taken with the soundscapes. I asked around, but still no one had seen her. I knew deep down that her absence was part of the show itself.

  I was in the largest gallery room, with the megaphone projection screens, when Dimitra, Fady, and the kids walked past the installation outside, Rami looking down at his shoes, smiling, listening to Leila talk with her hands. Then, they all stopped to look at something not in the frame. I felt a pang of nostalgia for something I couldn’t name. A sense of something missing.

  On the screen I watched Dimitra talk in animated silence while Fady and Leila and Rami listened intently, their faces tilted sideways at the same exact angle. What was interesting about this footage was that the backgrounds kept changing; you might see the same images but never in the same order. Fady said Nefeli had programmed the footage film loops to continue to splice in new ones. Now the screen backdrop was the Polytechnic tanks. When they disappeared from view, the backdrop changed to a scene of South African apartheid. Then footage of hundreds of Bosnian refugees walking a dirt road.

  Then suddenly there was Nefeli. Standing close to one of the cameras so it captured her alone. But I realized that I had no idea when this had taken place, because I’d been startled to see myself just a few moments ago. One minute I’d been watching Fady, Dimitra, and the kids depart, and then suddenly there I was arriving with them. Because the footage from this evening on the sidewalk was being added to the historical footage, looped in in random fragments as it accumulated, it was hard to tell at any given moment whether you were, in fact, watching a feed of something outside that had taken place an hour ago, ten minutes ago. So this could have been an image of Nefeli from earlier this evening, or weeks ago as she tested the installation. It could have been right now.

  I had done a decent job of not thinking too much about all these absences, those both prevailing and impending, but in the silence of the video installation, in front of that large screen, I felt them. We have our wounds and our desires and they wind around us like unraveling metal sculpture, like barbed wire.

  On my way home I walked by her studio. Faint music streamed from her window. The street was dark except for the glow from her studio, as if the only things that mattered were the things inside that large, high-ceilinged space, those old walls, Nefeli still hard at work, racing against time.

  PART TWO

  12

  Mira

  June arrived in Greece like the return of a loyal but evasive lover. The early May cold snap I’d been greeted with was now balanced by an early heat wave. But we were invigorated by the warmth before its blankness exhausted us. Sundays we swam, staying at the beach until the sun disappeared, and when we came home we’d sit on someone’s balcony, wanting to extend the day. Temperatures soared. We counted swims. I thought of inviting the Captain to come with us, but I didn’t. He’d be leaving again soon, but I didn’t ask him exactly when.

  Athens felt familiar and foreign and hot. The mood was sometimes defiant and sometimes bleak. Refugees continued to arrive on the shores at an alarming rate, so frequently that it unfortunately normalized, became a part of the Greek reality, whereas coverage of it seemed to have disappeared everywhere else. The circus of US politics dominated foreign headlines, Greek ones too. Greeks, meanwhile, remained overwhelmed, and the international media did not know what to say. People posted news stories with a sort of perfunctory numbness. There was a spate of suicides: a woman shooting herself in a public square, another couple jumping from a balcony. I met with an old friend who’d lost her job; she’d moved back in with her parents, near Patras. At least we have the sea, she said, knowing damn well it was not enough. Another friend sold his family apartment to a German couple, who’d rent it out on Airbnb, adding that Airbnb would destroy Athens just as it had Barcelona. He was unwilling to discuss it with me any further. Dimitra’s sister moved in with her best friend, and they taught yoga classes in their living room. It’s the new order of things, was all she said.

  Since her show had opened, Nefeli had grown particularly agitated, constantly wanting to adjust things, showing up at the museum in the middle of the night, asking the guards to let her in, calling the curator to shift things around, calling Fady to edit the sound, constantly splicing new things into the video. Nefeli was in a constant state of revision. It was as if her show were a living, growing, breathing thing. This, of course, made it all the more interesting, with people stopping in every few days to see what had changed. And it was getting excellent reviews. New images appeared on the screens: bright-orange background with the lines from a poet, dead now for some twenty years: our flags in tatters, with and without wind, no fire left in our hearts. She’d befriended him years ago. Take water with you / the future will be dry.

  And the attention was international. The BBC did a feature on her, and the footage of Nefeli and the male British reporter walking through the megaphones was spliced into the video footage too. The European papers had all mentioned her show, including her absence at the opening, and all this both enraged the Greeks (why does she get all the foreign attention?) and filled them with pride (she’s one of ours!).

  One evening I rode home with the same taxi driver I’d had when I first arrived in Athens, when he first dropped me off at the apartment. This was not so unusual, but it felt, somehow, momentous. He recognized me and was talkative. The name of my street translates to “Of Warriors and Thieves”—Armatolon kai Klefton. The word for “sinners” is close to the word for “warriors”—just the transposing of two consonants—and I think even those who knew their history, that the armatoloi kai kleftoi were key figures during Ottoman rule, seemed to mishear it. The taxi driver asked me if I was a sinner, and I repeated the street name. “Yes, yes,” he said. “I know. But ‘sinners’ rolls off the tongue faster.” I forced a laugh.

  The driver, maybe hearing my accent, told me he’d lived many years in New York and completely reinvented himself there, and when he returned to Athens he had to do it all over again.

  I understood this need for reinvention. My
father had done so brilliantly. My mother could not, but her old self could also not exist in the new place. For a while, I think, those first years in the United States, my mother was fighting something, on the verge of escape: from her body, from her mind. And somewhere in there, between the time I was five and twelve, she surrendered, began to damage her body as if to kill that other self. And when my teen years arrived, she began to sense a wildness in me, a desire to get out, go up, move away. She began to see that I had a body too. And if she did not feel outright hate, it was resentment, and I don’t know which is worse. She left Greece because she had felt she had to, whereas she saw my leaving home as a choice—and that offended her, just the way my changing body offended her. I didn’t tell all this to the driver, of course, but I told it later that night, to the Captain.

  There was a lot of traffic, and the taxi driver concentrated on the road. We drove the rest of the way home in silence, save for his taking a few calls. When we pulled up to my building he looked at me in his rearview mirror. “You’re Greek,” he asked. “Right?”

  I didn’t bother with “Greek American.” Obviously, he figured this. I thanked him and got out of the car. He told me to take care of myself.

  When I was growing up in Chicago it was not unusual for people to ask: What are you? They wanted your ethnic identity, and I never thought much of it; where I grew up, we were all from somewhere else, so the question was more curious than critical. But there was an element of racism to it. Here, I’d done it myself on the metro, seen teenagers of most likely Chinese or Nigerian heritage, say, and first thought they were American tourists until I heard them speaking Greek with the mannerisms and gestures of native-born speakers, until I realized they were most likely native speakers. And I’ve seen people try to place Fady’s origins. Asking about his name, where he went to school, puzzled at his elegant, refined Greek. He studied in Paris, he always says; he grew up there. It’s not that he is rejecting his past, it’s that he resists this quiet aggression, that somehow he owes people his story, owes them one solid, unchanging identity. He feels both Greek and not-Greek, he speaks Greek, and that is enough.

  Me, I don’t know what I felt. I didn’t not feel Greek. I did not feel particularly American either, but I felt comfortable in my outsiderness. Maybe this was a function of Americanness, or whiteness, to feel one can go anywhere and belong. I certainly didn’t feel Greek American. In Chicago I’d associated this only with church and Greek school. After my mother witnessed me, at a rehearsal, commemorate a historical event that involved falling to our deaths, she became enraged. “I don’t want the village to follow me,” she said, and I was yanked out before I had had the chance to jump from the stage, an act I had really been looking forward to. When we got home she took a washcloth and vigorously scrubbed all the makeup off my face. My mother, so anxious that she might be rejected, was always the one to reject first. She and Nefeli were a lot alike.

  I asked her once, after a discussion with my friends—all of us with immigrant parents, or immigrants ourselves, Ukrainian and Lebanese and Indian and Korean—if we were white. She answered without hesitation. “No,” she said, as if I were an idiot. “We’re Greek.” She was begging the question, but I dropped it.

  “I could spend the rest of my life trying to understand her,” I told the Captain.

  “Have you ever written about her?” he asked.

  I told him I’d only written about people who’d explicitly given me permission. People I came to know under the pretext of writing about them. As I said it I felt a little uneasy.

  He was quiet for a moment. “So you don’t really come to know them. Only who they’re showing themselves to be.”

  I put my head down in my hands, suddenly dizzy, light-headed. I could no longer be a cipher for other people’s stories—not in the academic context. It was too difficult to not acknowledge how I changed the space. Even listening is not passive, but it’s not as though I’d show up and listen. I spent weeks, months, years, even, building relationships. When I finished the oral histories, the most interesting things were the things I remembered, those things that had passed between us: a glance of knowing between the two of us, the long process of establishing friendship and trust, the moments spent laughing and crying. A hand held, a political fight, an inappropriate crush, a surprising loss. Those were the things I wanted to write. I did not mention my own parents, who also lived through the junta, who married when it was over, had me, and, five years later, left Greece for good.

  I am certainly not the first to have had this feeling, but it has begun to weigh on me. My dissertation involved collecting oral histories from the junta, and my first book the stories of women specifically, from prison camp survivors to sympathizers of the regime. I am happy I wrote it. But compiling all these stories, arranging them, editing them—it was more art than scholarship. It’s why I was so thrilled when Svetlana Alexievich won the Nobel for Literature, an acknowledgment that imagination was as much a part of what we did as what a novelist does, an acknowledgment of living with all those voices, a human ear, she called herself, carrying them with her.

  The cicadas were loud but the neighborhood felt still, hot, like we were the only two people moving, in action. “Isn’t that how we come to know anyone,” I finally said. The wall between our balconies, which had allowed a kind of intimacy, at that moment felt cruel. I wanted him to put his hand on my shoulder, I wanted to see his eyes.

  “Could be,” he said.

  “I wouldn’t know where to start, writing about my mother.”

  “Haven’t you already. Started.”

  “I guess. Yeah.” I wished him goodnight, but instead of going to sleep, I went out, wandered through Exarcheia a while, feeling broken, tender to the entire city, as if she—all of her—were talking to me.

  •

  Since Nefeli’s show had opened, she had stopped putting herself together. If I phoned while she was sleeping she became irritable. If I didn’t phone she was more irritable still. She’d work and work and then disappear to the island, cut off communication, as if she needed to re-grow or reconstitute herself.

  She wasn’t eating properly and seemed to have a dry, incessant cough. Yet she talked about returning to yoga, or taking up running. These things she uttered with such conviction that I think she truly believed she might. The city, the protests, the bleak situation for the refugees, all things she cared about deeply—it was all becoming too much. The crisis was disappearing from the global panic stage but not in Greece itself, she said. How is this going to define us all, she wanted to know.

  The crisis imaginary, she called it.

  One afternoon, Dimitra and Fady and I went to visit her. When we arrived, she didn’t look well but rushed us out of the flat. We asked if she’d eaten and she lied and said yes. But that day, she seemed eager to go out. Dimitra suggested a nearby old, traditional taverna Nefeli loved—my father had loved it too, and as a toddler I had often come here with my parents, my small stroller parked outside. In fact, there’s a picture of me standing on a chair in a green dress on my third birthday, a paper crown on my head, my parents behind me, laughing. Nefeli had been a regular there since before I was born, the first public place she’d eaten when she returned from her island exile, barely nineteen. Maybe afterward I’d get her to lie down.

  “No,” she said. “It’s a winter place.” I knew it was something more. Instead she suggested a vegetarian restaurant in Syntagma, run by a young Greek woman and her Afghan husband—friendly, relaxed, impossibly thin, glowy yoga people who always spoke in generous, warm tones. It was a great place indeed, but far, and the metro was on strike and it was too hot to walk, and Nefeli refused, for whatever reason, to move through the city in a taxi. We went instead to a small Cretan place down the block.

  Outside, a bag of trash had spilled onto the sidewalk. Nefeli swore, kicked a carton of juice down the street, and her foot became entangled with a plastic bag. A young man passing by us gave her a dirty look,
his lip in a sneer.

  I motioned for Fady and Dimitra to sit. He grabbed a table and Nefeli, without resistance, followed. She put her head down in her hands. “Nothing is changing,” she said. Her voice was muffled, desperate. Fady glanced at me, quickly, and my gut tightened. He pointed toward the board, set up on the sidewalk: LOCALLY SOURCED. LOCAL DRINKS. VEGETARIAN.

  “I mean. Seriously,” he said.

  I downed my draft before the first plates of food came—dakos salad, mini pies stuffed with mizithra cheese, fries—and ordered another, glancing at Fady and Nefeli to see if they’d noticed. I fidgeted with my phone.

  “If you take a photo of this,” Dimitra said, waving her hand over the table, “I swear I will get up and leave.” I don’t think I have ever posted a photo of a meal, but I said nothing. Nefeli, however, laughed, and we were all grateful for this. Fady rolled a cigarette and said if they made the sidewalk seating nonsmoking he’d riot. He rarely smoked. Nefeli stood to say hello to a friend inside, then disappeared to the bathroom, stalking past a table of young people who stopped to watch her back disappear through the door. She was upsetting even the anarchists.