Scorpionfish

by Natalie Bakopoulos

  My mother called out to me from the cement bench inside the school’s courtyard, where she smoked a cigarette and read the leftist paper. “You see what it feels like? Now you know.”

  I sat on a bench and scrolled through my phone. On a whim, I opened a message to the Captain. I’d entered his phone number after he scrawled it on the corner of a yellow legal pad on my small desk, from that day I’d asked him about the heater. I’d never used it, of course. When I wanted to talk I opened the door to the balcony. I typed and typed, deleted and deleted, saying nothing, what to say, but something was compelling me to connect. Hi. Hello. Ti kaneis. Ti yinetai. Are you sleeping. I gave up. The instinct to tell him something was so visceral yet we had never really established this sort of communication. Besides those few occasions—the island, the roof—our chats were sequestered to the balcony and for now that’s where they would stay. We had not established a pattern of public communication. We did not meet for coffee, and besides those few small interactions—a brush of our bodies in the stairwell, his hand through my hair—that loomed so large in my mind, we’d barely touched. Though I did not exactly understand his marital situation, he seemed to still have a marital situation, and I did not want to knock on that door, not even in the spirit of friendship. Those conversations, had I imagined them? They took on the quality of dreams so vivid they broke the barrier of memory. The barrier of anything.

  But Rami warmed to me, and we sat together on that same bench where my mother had smoked her cigarette. He showed me some more of his drawings, which were becoming more and more sophisticated: kids with black-and-blue hair, long streets lined with citrus trees, and the empty, blocked-out squares for the rest of his story.

  Everything felt either rigidly compartmentalized or limitless.

  •

  What happened after the vandalism was that a young collective of artists, instead of cleaning up the graffiti and repairing the puncture wounds in the megaphones, had stenciled them with blue scorpions skittering into and out of the holes. When I walked to the small square where many of them assembled, near the squat, I found Leila there, her eyebrows dyed blue. She, too, was growing, her face moving from a child’s to a young woman’s, an angularity to her features she didn’t have just a few months ago.

  She asked if I’d spoken with Rami. I said of course I had. “Why?”

  She looked at me, as if deciding what to say. “No reason,” she said.

  I asked if she’d seen Nefeli, and she shook her head.

  The museum curator hadn’t seen her either, and Nefeli, after those interviews, had refused to communicate any instructions regarding the installation. Her laconic, spare e-mails said the same thing she’d said originally: it was public space, it belonged to everyone and no one, that she’d had no right to it, that those vandals, and now the artists, had every bit of right that she did. It kept her narrative moving. Meanwhile, some of the local residents were complaining, wanting it cleaned up, didn’t like all those kids hanging around. For all she knew, Nefeli said, they had been the culprits.

  I went by Nefeli’s apartment. She didn’t answer the bell, but when another resident left I walked in like I belonged there. I was, after all, good at that. I knocked on her door, called to her gently, but there was nothing. Her neighbor heard me knocking and offered that several days before she’d seen her leaving with a duffel bag, her easel, her camera around her neck. Her mail was piled up in the foyer.

  Fady and Dimitra hadn’t seen her either. One night, Dimitra and I got drunk on my balcony, and she leaned in and asked, “Do you think Nefeli vandalized her own work?”

  The possibility had not crossed my mind. “She likes attention,” I said. “But not this much.” Still, her comments stayed with me a long time. I understood something I don’t think I had before: that Nefeli and her art were the same thing. That the same kinetic energy that went into her work could destroy her: she both created and absorbed it. Not a collection of selves but a composite I. Whole.

  Nefeli’s show continued to run, and the vandalism gave it even more publicity. It was all over the art magazines, the culture pages. Dutch tourists were always being interviewed outside the museum. The screen displayed those scurrying scorpions and the young artists dressed in black, some still with blue eyebrows, streaks in their hair, juxtaposed with footage of protests in Syntagma, from the tent city that was there several years before. I couldn’t free myself of the notion that Nefeli had somehow merged into her work. Time was folding in on itself. I took a photo of the screen and then of the installation outside.

  That night I dreamt of those blue scorpions, vivid, graphic, scurrying, and I woke up hot, sweat pooling on my lower back, behind my neck. I drank a glass of water and washed my face, ran a cool washcloth over my skin. From the balcony I stared down on the courtyard. The moon was bright. In the distance the low bass beats from a club still sounded, a group of female voices laughed, a woman told a story she found so funny that she gasped to get the words out.

  “Are you there,” I asked, to no one.

  Back inside, I moved closer to Nefeli’s painting and in the near darkness noticed something blue next to the figure of a woman, on the floor. I stared at it a long time, and its outlines seemed to sharpen. I had never paid attention to it before, but now in the dark I was sure it was a scorpion. In the corner, near the balcony door, my mother slept upright in my reading chair, her glasses resting on her chest.

  When I woke up I returned to the painting. The blue was just a splash of color. Nothing more.

  When I’d moved into this apartment it had felt nearly blank. I knew I had lived here and I had remembered certain moments: the way the window in the kitchen looked into another person’s kitchen in the next building, the sound of the elevator, the wash of light in the living room in the morning, the violent spin of the washing machine, the echo of voices in the stairwell. But there had been something collapsed about it. The longer I stayed the longer I felt the web of interconnections filling it back with breath: me, my parents, the Captain, Nefeli, Haroula, Rami, Leila, Dimitra, Fady.

  When I went down to check my mail—something I did religiously in Chicago but often would forget for days in Athens, as if I were somehow unreachable—I found a letter addressed to the Captain that had been mistakenly placed in my box. I held it in my hand like it was a small, delicate animal. I read his name out loud, acknowledging his identity as something far outside of myself, outside our intersections. I am unable to rectify his given name with the man who speaks to me, conversations so hushed and intimate they nearly feel like talks with myself.

  Heavy sleep. Shadow dreams of Greek school. Morning rehearsals of a performance, cider and donuts, the only reason I liked to go. All the children were asked to come up to the stage, but I kept eating my French cruller, quite happily, and looking over at my mother, smiling at all the kids swarming to the front. Somehow I did not think I was one of them, and my mother waved me to go too, and I was alarmed. I climbed onto the stage, now my older self, walked past the children, and slipped through the heavy velvet curtain, which led me to my balcony, where the Captain waited for me.

  15

  Mira

  When I came to Athens for my parents’ burial I didn’t make it to the island. Despite the shock of winter green, the bleak wind and stillness would have been too much. Now, my first trip back, the ferry moved through the mist like a phantom voyage. But within an hour the weather had cleared and I sat on the top deck, my face to the sun. For a short while I forgot myself and felt content.

  Then, as the first island began to appear on the horizon, I felt a returning creep of dread. Six months earlier my parents were still alive. Five months earlier I’d still been with Aris, wandering through his Plaka apartment in a daze, comforted by his presence, his tenderness then. Eva would have already been pregnant. What had he told her? An old friend had come to stay? His girlfriend, in fact, but no, the timing was wrong for telling her?

  From the island port, it’
s a fifteen-minute walk to the house. On the way was a small parking lot, and only then did I notice my parents’ old flat-nosed Fiat. My mother drove that car all around the island, my father in the passenger seat, chatting. Most of the time, I realize only now, she was probably drunk, or well on her way.

  To return to a place again and again is to confront the sneaky passing of time. Here I am at fifteen, at twenty-five, at twenty-nine, at thirty-nine. What of those earlier selves is left in me?

  Our narrow street was deserted. I pulled my suitcase up the steep incline and climbed the stairs to our red front door. I don’t know why, but I knocked. When I was a child I used to come to our own door and ask, in Greek, if the American girl could come out to play, and I think there was a part of me that hoped I would appear from the inside of the house, my own double. Now I hesitated under the stone archway, fumbled for the key, and let myself in.

  What always hit me the hardest was the smell: the wool of the rugs that hung on the walls, the white flokati on the tile floor. When the place hadn’t been aired out it smelled slightly of mold, which held a comforting familiarity, though Kyria Voula, who cared for me when I was a child, must have recently been by because the windows were open.

  I opened drawers and cupboards. Whereas the flat in Athens had been mostly stripped of my parents, save for those few reminders, a few things in the storage closet, the memory of the rooftop, they were everywhere here. In the top-left cabinet I found the briki—my father only drank Greek coffee, and luckily there were plenty of places near our home in Chicago to indulge his particularly endearing snobbery—and the water glasses, the small blue tumblers for juice. On the other side stood the whiskey glasses, and behind them the plastic cups I used as a child. The other cupboard held my father’s various bottles of tsipouro and behind them my mother’s arsenal: vodka, bourbon, gin.

  As I waited for coffee to boil, I opened the linen closet and put my face to a soft white pillowcase dotted with small blue flowers. Behind the clean towels I noticed some glass and retrieved an almost-empty whiskey bottle, as if my mother had told herself that if she didn’t polish it off, she had barely had any at all.

  I don’t know why I thought I’d be alone in this house. I texted Nefeli, wondering if she were here, but got no response. Part of the reason I’d come to the island was to look for her. And partly because my apartment had felt so empty without my nightly conversations with the Captain.

  Soon I collapsed onto my small double bed and didn’t move for an hour, exhausted from all the grief that seemed to exponentially compound with each new event, each new addition. I wanted to empty myself of it.

  I took a fresh towel from the closet and unwrapped an olive oil soap. In the mirror I saw the pattern from the woven blanket imprinted in my cheek. I forgot to first turn on the hot-water heater, so I froze in the shower. Still, after, I felt a bit better, though the weight of all those physical reminders of loss had exhausted me.

  Everything leaves its mark.

  Fortunately, by then, it was night.

  •

  The next day I drove to have lunch with Aris’s father, the novelist, who lived in the mountain village at the top of the island. I had been first introduced to him as “the novelist” and it’s how I, and many others, still referred to him. We’d had a friendship prior to the one I’d had with Aris, from back when I was writing my dissertation. So it didn’t strike me as particularly strange that he’d extend the invitation; it was hard to remain anonymous here. At the same time, driving up the winding mountain road, it felt as though I’d been summoned for a goodbye.

  I left my car at the village’s edge—you could not drive through the narrow passages, and because of this, the little streets into the village felt like corridors, the doors opening to rooms of one giant dwelling. You reach a sweet little overlook and quickly realize it’s a private terrace.

  The village felt clear and still, so different from the hectic ambiance near the port, from the beaches with their bars and tavernas. And after the bustle and noise and smells of Athens, it felt like another planet, with the island mountain stillness, the shock of bright flowers, the echoes from inside the dwellings nestled into the hills. It’s a particular type of mountain repose, one I haven’t felt anywhere else in the world.

  I was early, so before turning the corner to the taverna I took a detour to wander the hushed, narrow streets. Colorful rugs hung from balconies, and I could hear the muted sounds of conversation, some violin music, the sound of silverware on plates.

  I passed the novelist’s house: his large red door and then the smaller green one of his guest studio, where I’d stayed many nights with Aris: a space detached from the main house, with its own entrance, bathroom, and tiny kitchenette. Though the two shared a wall, to reach it you had to exit the main home and walk ten steps down the narrow road. I had a flash of that younger self, the one in the gossip photo, stumbling back here with Aris, buzzed, after one of the famous dinners his father often hosted, headed to bed reeling from the joy of those hours just before dawn, fueled with wine and music and conversation. How we’d sometimes find the most stalwart of the guests having coffees the next morning, still at the table, not having slept. I’m romanticizing it a bit, I know, but I had really loved this life. It’s when I felt my best, truest self.

  •

  The novelist and I sat down at Thanassis’s, on its traditional terrace shaded with grapevines and shocks of pink flowers, at a table at the veranda’s edge, looking over the valley. A huge plane tree stood grandly in the center. The actual kitchen was across the street—and by street I mean these narrow pedestrian walkways, no cars and only the occasional donkey—though there was a small bar within the café space itself. Sometimes Thanassis’s son—Thanassis himself had died last year—plugged in an old, clunky television and set it atop the bar for soccer games.

  When I was a graduate student, before Aris and I were together, I had spent two fascinating days listening to his father talk about the junta, which echoed the Nazi occupation, which echoed the Greek Civil War that started when the Germans left, and all of which was being echoed now. He kissed me hello, and though this was not the first time I’d noticed it, Aris had his eyes—wide set, almond shaped, nearly black. My eyes, of course, were my mother’s.

  I lowered my gaze, and he leaned over the table and tipped my chin to him, the way my father used to do. “I’m so sorry, Myrto,” he said. It was the first time I’d seen him since my parents’ funeral. I was used to this sort of sympathy, and though I was always glad for the kindness, I learned very quickly how to make people comfortable around my loss. But I realized he was also talking about Aris, and the freshness of the rejection surged through my body again, as if I were experiencing it for the first time.

  I told him everything would be fine. I wanted to ask him if he’d known, but I couldn’t bear to hear the answer, the humiliation of it. But as if reading my mind, he offered the information. “Aris only told me before he left for Brussels.” I nodded again and let out a long, shaky exhale.

  It seemed as though he wanted to say more. I feared that the knot in my throat would become permanent, the tightness in my chest. “Of course we’ll stay friends,” he pronounced.

  We shared a plate of lamb chops. Here in the mountain villages it was meat and meat and meat, which always surprised my father, who remembered an Athens childhood almost devoid of it. Everywhere you went it seemed people were grilling it. There was always an endless supply of local white wine in large plastic jugs. At first introduction I thought it would be terrible, but I’ve grown fond of it, the sharp barb of it that cuts the food, its soft back end.

  The novelist topped off my glass again and again as the afternoon spiraled out, our conversation similarly circling and weaving, and I slowly relaxed. Aris had loved the way my mother would balk when he tried to pour her a drink, feigning shock if he poured too much, a gesture that would have been amusing had she not been slowly destroying her liver. Once, at a party to
celebrate Aris’s PhD defense, she gently tipped his bottle of beer so it would pour a bit more into her glass.

  As for my mother, I have long ago replaced blame with sympathy for her behaviors that, as a teenager, I perceived to be inadequacies. Even in her moments of rage against me I’d understood that she did not mean them. In some ways I had distanced myself from my mother in the way I might view a grandparent: all-loving, a person you knew in a very specific capacity; but you could not imagine their life before you, could not really know them. It was Aris who’d helped me with this, his push to give me an understanding of my parents through his Greek lens, through the lens of exile, through the lens of a difficult past. His own grandparents had been refugees, and he said that the trauma of forced migration was inherited. Eva promised him stability, tradition. I could give him many things, but not that.

  There are no secrets. Everybody knows everything.

  Everything is a lie, Kazantzidis sang.

  The waiter cleared our plates, returned with a small platter of nectarines and berries.

  “Myrto,” the novelist said, hesitating over his first bite. “Have you seen Nefeli?”

  I told him that since her show had opened, even before the vandalism, our visits had felt fragmented—Nefeli’s moods had been more erratic than usual, and she often announced suddenly that she had to go or had another appointment, some changes to make at the museum or work to do at her studio. She was working on new paintings but forbade us to see them.

  “I invited her for lunch last week,” I said, “but she didn’t respond.”

  “She’s on the island,” he said. So she had been here. Nefeli was a hard person to pin down, as if she moved quickly through portals.

  “Listen,” he said, after a pause. “I’m going to tell you something, but you have to promise to pretend you do not know.” I gestured for him to go on. He reached over and took my hands in his. “Nefeli is not well.”