Scorpionfish

by Natalie Bakopoulos

  I waited for Fady to say something about the hipsterfication of this neighborhood, about crisis tourism, but he was quiet.

  But he watched me closely, as if I might reveal something new. Did he think I knew something about Nefeli? Did he think I was drinking too much? Were we all watching one another this closely?

  Meanwhile, Dimitra watched Nefeli, who was inside, talking with the bartender. The more distant a person, the less they knew about her, the more she lit up. When Nefeli returned to our table, Fady gently joked with her, and though she was usually quick-witted and acerbic, she didn’t say much.

  We paid our tab and Fady left for the workshop to meet a client. He sounded exhausted. He was worried about Rami’s newfound moodiness, and Nefeli’s unsettledness had us all in a constant state of unease. Dimitra headed to the squat, and Nefeli and I walked together. She asked if she could come to my place, sit on the balcony a moment. It was too hot for the balcony, where my laundry hung and dried within minutes, but I agreed. Even without air conditioning, my apartment’s relative cool darkness felt nice. I turned on the ceiling fan, remembering how cold I’d been when I’d first arrived.

  For a while, she stared, like a cat, through the pass-through into the living room. Finally, she lay down on the couch and fell asleep. I felt calm with her there, as though I was somehow protecting her. So much of my life Nefeli had looked out for me.

  When I heard a thud, something falling to the ground, I checked in on her, but it was just her phone, having slipped from her pocket. I’d since hung some other paintings I’d found in the closet, her others from this series—the church on the island—and she napped underneath dark colors, each with shocks of Aegean blue. It was on a visit when I was fifteen that I made the connection between these images and Nefeli, a connection even now difficult to retain. Other paintings, those of the women, I kept in the closet, worried somehow that they’d upset her. But this is not why it’s difficult for me to integrate these paintings of the young artist Nefeli with the woman who came to check on me when I arrived, the woman I drink beer with at Mavili. When you know somebody so well, it’s hard to also recognize their public selves. I see Aris’s name now in the paper, the rising star of his party, and I read it with both detached fascination and a knot in my gut. Even I, the person who writes the oral histories, who publishes the essays, is not the same self who now writes these words. She is barely here at all.

  Nefeli’s show, her insistence on both a retrospective and new work, was part of her desire to define time as anything that was not now: yesterday, tomorrow, last year. Her anger that day was a sort of premonition, a glimpse into a future we didn’t want to see. Or a future we could see but had no power to alter.

  In the early evening Nefeli woke and I made some tea—she drank it with milk and honey, which is how I now drank it, even in summer—and when I returned to the table with the tray she was staring at the painting, as if she had not noticed it before. I waited for her to say something but she didn’t. We drank our tea and she suggested a walk.

  We headed down along Lykavittos, and Nefeli was quiet until we reached the entrance of the park. “I forgot you had those others,” she said. “The paintings.”

  I hoped it didn’t rekindle bad feelings: about Haroula, other loves, a past that was never really past. She was indeed in another conversation. “There are so many ways to be unfaithful,” she continued. “There are so many ways to betray someone.”

  We walked through the park, where the keening of the cicadas was almost deafening; they were trapped in their own nightmare. She stopped walking, to listen. “They’re dying,” she said. “That’s why they sing.” She kissed me on both cheeks. “I’m going home now,” she said, and when she disappeared around the corner I had a sickening feeling I would not see her again.

  In some way, I was right.

  Back in my apartment I detected the faint smell of rose water, like my mother used to wear. I couldn’t look at Nefeli’s paintings. I sat in the living room and tried to read, but found myself turning pages without having taken in a word.

  Nearby, someone’s rock band had begun to practice, their piercing guitars filling the courtyard with a Metallica song I remembered from my childhood, which soon transitioned to a heavy metal version of “Evdokia’s Zeibekiko,” which I also remember from my childhood. My mother had wanted to name me Evdokia, after the movie, and my father was incensed because the character was a prostitute. Since the film, no one could have that name without association, he said, though I thought it was a great name, meaning “she whose deeds are good.” Instead, they named me Myrto, and often called me the diminutive, Myroula. When we moved to Chicago, both versions proved difficult for English speakers, and I became Mira. But in Greek, it sounds like the word “fate,” a name that seems to ask for trouble, and my parents rarely used it, and Nefeli never did. Me, I answered to both.

  A few mornings later, I went down for my mail. In the foyer next to the mailboxes was a large box inscribed with my name, not shipped but simply dropped off. I opened it up and found several new pairs of lacy underwear in light, springy colors, wrapped in tissue paper; a pile of Greek poetry books translated into English; a stack of old Greek postcards from the 1970s; and a new box of notecards, printed with Nefeli’s early paintings, the kind you’d find in a museum gift shop; and two packages of Thassian olives. She’d opened the box of notecards and used one, of the print that hung in my living room, to write: For Myrto xo N. I called to thank her but she didn’t pick up her phone, so I sent a text: Thank you, dear Nefeli. What is all this for?

  She wrote a few hours later. Just a little gift.

  •

  That night, the garbage strike ended, and when the trucks barreled down the narrow streets of the neighborhood, I stood with Sophia outside her shop. People clapped and cheered and the drivers waved, like a postwar parade. I looked up to the Captain’s front balcony, where he stood watching as well. He waved at us both. “Ah ha,” Sophia said.

  Fady began a new cello he’d deliver to a musician in Berlin. He planned to spend some time with friends, working on another sound project, though I knew he wouldn’t be able to leave Rami, who was going with him, right away. The details and the timing were confusing. Fady kept it quiet, and I knew to stop asking, knowing that he’d had to arrange something convoluted and questionable and even that would take a while. Though Rami talked about his brother often, he never said a word about Germany, as if it, and his future there, did not yet exist. Then again, I could not imagine Athens without him, and I, too, didn’t want to see this future, which to me also did not exist.

  That day, the building and the courtyard were oddly still. I stood on my balcony. I wondered what the Captain was doing. I knew he was leaving soon, and he seemed to become a little distant, withdrawn, or maybe it was me. I didn’t leave the house for two days. Dimitra texted from Syntagma: there was another parliamentary vote about to happen, but at this point it felt as if the papers could simply have run the last story that appeared about it. Trapped in a cycle.

  At the squat that week a small girl, the one whose hand Rami had held at the eye doctor’s, glued herself to my side when I taught. Though she was three, perhaps even four, she did not speak. Her father was there with her, though I had never seen him; many of the men were not around while we were. She listened and nodded, and in the English lessons I could tell she was learning the words. She would point out the photos when I would say cat or water or house. She drew houses, again and again. One day, some of the volunteers outside the classroom were playing with the other children, making paper crowns. She came in to show me and I said, “Crown!” And she nodded, so proud, and pointed to my phone. We took a photo. Rami loved her, too, and when he spoke to her in Arabic she beamed. When I asked Rami if she spoke to him, he said no, she hadn’t said a word since she arrived. He drew her pictures—a frog, a house, a field of flowers—and she’d march around the courtyard with them, proud. She’d sit down with some crayons, coloring
in the lines. Rami always let her paint his nails.

  After, I took Rami back to Dimitra and Fady’s. Dimitra and I sat in her kitchen, having coffee. “Do you think Rami wants to stay here,” I asked. “With you and Fady and Leila. Go to the American school in the fall.”

  “He has relatives in Germany.”

  “I know. But not his parents.”

  “Well. His brother. His father’s cousin, her husband. Still, family.”

  I didn’t say anything.

  Dimitra hit the table with her hand. “For fuck’s sake, Mira,” she said. “We can’t just take the kid. He doesn’t belong to everyone. He’s not mine, he’s not Fady’s, Leila is not his sister.”

  But Leila was like a sister. To me, they were a family. “Okay. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to upset you. Was just thinking aloud.”

  “Sometimes you’re so first-world. So white. You think you have a solution to everything.”

  “You haven’t thought of it?” I recalled Fady’s excitement when Rami watched soccer with him, which Leila had long outgrown. The way they’d all watch movies together on the big couches, piled under blankets, Fady’s special popcorn.

  “Enough,” Dimitra said. “Change the subject, please.”

  •

  When I came home I felt as though I had forgotten something, and as I pushed open my door I remembered: the Captain was leaving, headed for the island with his family for the summer. “For the kids,” he’d said a few nights ago as we spoke on the balcony, as if I deserved an explanation. “Katerina took them out of school early,” he added, in case I was wondering. They were returning to Greece. His wife had a few weeks of vacation and would accompany them initially, but when she returned to Brussels he’d stay with the kids on the island.

  I hurried home, bounded up the steps, and went out to the balcony and listened. Stuck on my side of the partition were a few Post-it notes, as if he had reached his arm around and placed them there.

  Mira. I have to go. Talk soon.

  The second one had his phone number. I still had the yellow pad on which he’d written it the first time, in the top drawer of my desk, a remnant from that first, early encounter with the heater that now felt like a surreal offering, rewritten by the contract between us.

  The third: Δύναμη! Strength. This one was written in a different-colored pen, and then he included a goofy smiley face, which seemed delightfully out of character. I went inside and stuck all three on the wall atop my desk. I sat down hard in the chair. My lip was trembling.

  But only minutes later came a knock on the door. You had to be buzzed in to the building, so no one knocked except the woman on the second floor who got angry when we didn’t lock the building door from the inside at night, or the superintendent who came to collect the payment for the shared utilities—but she had come by two days earlier. Nefeli always let herself in, too, but she always announced herself, slightly irritated. Myrto let me in.

  It was the Captain. He wore jeans and a navy T-shirt. Rubber sandals, the type soccer players wear. An old duffel bag at his side. Light beard. New glasses, dark red. I smiled. I so rarely saw him in person, and this glimpse into his wardrobe warmed my heart. I could hardly connect him to the person I spoke with in that precarious safety of the balcony.

  “I was loading my car but wanted to check once more if you were home.”

  “New glasses,” I said. So strange to do so watching his facial expressions, seeing his body language, as I spoke. He smiled.

  “Do you want to have a beer?” As though I invited him in every evening.

  He hesitated. “I’m sorry.” He drew the words out. “I have to go.”

  He looked down at me, breathed in. Then he placed his hand on my head, as if in benediction. “Be good,” he said. He moved his hand through my hair, first as if he’d gone to playfully tousle it but reconsidered midmotion. It was an awkward moment, but then he continued running his hand through its length, slowly, tangles and all. A pleasant shiver ran down the back of my neck, my spine.

  He brought his hand to my cheek, tapped my nose. “You got some sun,” he said.

  I touched my nose and smiled. My words were lodged in my throat. “See you,” I said.

  13

  The Captain

  Katerina and the kids returned from Brussels and I rejoined them in Kifissia. Those several days before we left for the island, we didn’t discuss a legitimate split. Katerina was not wavering, but I suspect she feared the judgment of her friends and her parents, and perhaps also the unknown. In no hurry to go through with anything official, she accepted the odd, indeterminate state between us. Though sometimes it frustrated me, other times I gladly accepted it. There was a renewed affection between us, and we even had sex far more often than we had in years.

  Then one night, afterward, she emerged from the bathroom in a pair of white pajamas and T-shirt: “This doesn’t mean we shouldn’t proceed with the divorce,” she said. We had not yet used the word, but she now spoke of divorce the way others might have discussed a long vacation, a new house—something exciting in the indefinite future.

  She got into bed beside me and asked if I regretted anything. I asked her where I should start. She laughed. But though I would never tell her that the marriage, this life, was never what I had envisioned for myself, I could not imagine another reality, not really.

  When I asked her the same, though, her face turned serious. “Regret,” she said. “I regret regret.”

  I stared at the ceiling fan, and she sat back up and scrolled through her phone. A friend from Brussels had sent her some photos, which she showed me. One close-up captured her profile. She was laughing, a raucous, full-body laugh, and I felt a pang of sadness, knowing that I could never give her such joy. I commented how happy and young she looked, and she smiled. I didn’t ask who had taken the photo, or who waited on the other end of the message. In another life I would ask who had sent it, but I no longer had the right.

  It’s a horrible feeling, to be with one person but thinking of another.

  I lay there staring at the ceiling. There had been something in her motions, her body, the way she pitched her hips up toward me as we had sex, that had felt new, unfamiliar. Something unsettling, even haunting, about the entire act.

  It made one thing clear: she was still in love. Just not with me.

  Later, I sat on the balcony of our bedroom, which overlooked our green street stretching ahead in front of me, widening as it ascended the hill before it dipped down into a small square that contained a large fountain and two lively cafés. Katerina poked her head outside and startled me. “I’m going to sleep,” she said.

  “Me too.”

  But I stalled, read a bit of a novel. When I finally got into bed Katerina turned to face me. “I worry about you alone, without us to tether you.” She intertwined her smooth, cold feet in mine, and we fell asleep together. How can anyone possibly understand what goes on in a marriage? How can anyone put it to language?

  I woke in the middle of the night to what I recognized as the long, lamenting blast of a ship’s foghorn, but I was not near the sea, and this was impossible.

  The next morning I dressed in the shaky early light and went for a run. The park was fuller than I remember it being on Saturday mornings. Everyone had, all at once, taken up running, then stayed in these clothes all day long. Athens looked like a Nike ad. I used to see the former prime minister running here, in expensive running gear and a gaggle of security. Mira had told me she’d seen the current prime minister running through Lykavittos, with two men and a woman in old sweatpants and T-shirts, and they’d smiled and waved at her. I came across the bend on a lesser-run trail and frightened a couple whose posture signaled they were either fighting or guilty. They looked at me as though I’d discovered them. I apologized and kept going.

  I ran much longer than usual.

  I knew I could not keep up this duality much longer, and when I returned to the house I’d tell Katerina I would go to the i
sland but stay at my father’s during the time she was there. When she went back to Brussels, I’d stay there with the kids so they wouldn’t have to leave.

  When I came home, the twins asked me how many turtles I’d seen in the park, and I lied and told them three. I hadn’t paid attention. I decided against my earlier idea. They all looked so happy. Katerina, still in her white pajamas, made pancakes. I walked to the massive refrigerator and filled my glass with ice, making a clownish show of it, acting surprised as all the ice tumbled to the floor.

  Katerina looked up absentmindedly, and Ifigenia asked, “What is wrong with you?” before they realized I was trying to make them laugh.

  •

  The night before we left for the island, I overhead a bit of Katerina’s phone conversation with her sister Effie. They were talking about the EU, which Katerina was adamant about Greece staying in.

  “Who knows what will happen without the EU,” Katerina said. “Without the euro. We go back to the drachma?”

  It was clear from Katerina’s responses that Effie disagreed. So many Greeks wanted to try something new. End the suffering already.

  You see? I don’t blame anyone. But in a way, I do.

  I was watching television alone in the den when Katerina reappeared and said they were all going to the movies. Normally she’d have invited me to join, but we had settled quietly into a new normal: separate lives underneath one roof. She asked if I wanted her to bring me something to eat, but I said I’d be fine.

  I was not used to being alone in this space; I even missed their noise. A few buildings over, someone held a party, the balcony adorned with white Moroccan lights. I thought of Morocco, leaving it, passing the Canary Islands, so bright and colorful they felt like a storybook.

  On another balcony a couple kissed; nearby some small children played with trucks while an older man, their grandfather, smoked a cigarette and scrolled through his phone. A cat stared at me, wanting something. I felt uneasy, exposed, yet deeply embedded in my loneliness, its haunting presence. I missed the sea. I went back inside and turned on the television, but every channel I turned to featured people shouting at one another, or miserable. Others just showed what seemed an endless string of loud car-chase scenes. I felt anxious and turned it off.