Scorpionfish

  I was not nothing.

  At the ship’s concession stand I bought a beer and some potato chips. I sat back on the top deck, in the setting sun. I remember the fading light. Nearby, a man in wire-rimmed glasses and a thick sweater sat reading a contemporary Greek writer, a book about two lovers in an e-mail exchange. He caught me looking at him and smiled, inviting me to sit, but I declined. I thought of course of the Captain, those long routes in the Pacific, when he was younger, that he had told me about. His resistance to staying in one place.

  While my parents were alive I felt a subconscious but powerful force that would not allow me to relocate to Greece, that somehow moving to the land they had left to give themselves, and me, what they saw as a better life, would be a betrayal. I could see my mother standing on the roof, her hands on her hips: We sacrifice so much so you can end up back here? Each time I returned I left pieces of my history around the city. A suitcase of things at Aris’s. What I’ve left in taxicabs alone could fill the shelves of my apartment: a bottle of wine and a mobile phone and several books and bags of gifts; books everywhere, really—on the metro, in a café, in a rented flat; scarves in tavernas and T-shirts and bathing suits in island hotel rooms. A bag of clothes in a rented apartment, a bottle of shampoo, a stack of postcards. A journal, almost filled, the worst and most embarrassing loss of all.

  Yet I think they knew my work and my heart would take me back here for good. My father was already retired and my mother nearly so. They had saved the way only a certain generation of immigrants can save, they had stashed cash not only in banks and in this apartment, but all over the house. After their deaths I had found it everywhere. And that spacious brick home in Chicago was worth an exorbitant amount, more than they had ever dreamed, but I had been reluctant to sell it. Now it seemed to belong to another world.

  •

  Back in Athens, I looked carefully at Nefeli’s paintings, the ones I hadn’t yet displayed. One depicted the back of a woman, long black hair, sitting in a chair looking out a small window onto a hilly landscape. On the floor was something blue. I stared at it until I thought it might move, and then I walked away from the painting, feeling shaken up. I left them propped up around the room, as if they were fresh.

  After my class, Rami waited for me outside the squat, wanting to talk about his graphic novel. So far, it was only images. “I don’t know which language to use to tell the story,” he said. “The one that’s hardest, or easiest?” I’m not sure if he meant skill or pain. I told him he should write in the language in which he felt most at home. “Your book could always be translated,” I said, and his face opened up then, as though I’d told him some giant secret. This must be part of the pleasure of having children, of watching the world reveal itself to them in simple and magnificent ways. For a kid like Rami, whose situational possibilities were currently limited, in limbo, the opening of the artistic and intellectual was no small thing. For any of us, really.

  Rami’s fourteenth birthday was in a week. I reminded him I knew, and his brow furrowed. He looked at his feet before looking up at me, a wan smile.

  “We’ll have to all do something special,” I said.

  “Yeah,” he said. Then he did something out of character. He flung himself at me, not his usual, boyish one-armed hug, but wrapping his arms around me. I hugged him back.

  Maybe I shouldn’t have mentioned it, this marker of time. It’s nearly impossible for the mind to reshape what was supposed to be a temporary situation into a permanent one. I worry now that my mentioning this somehow changed the course of events, or that my talk of multiple homes put ideas in his head, or that something I had said, somehow, caused what happened next.

  •

  A few days later, Dimitra called, nearly hysterical. “Mira, Mira, Mira mou,” she said, in tears, and I knew that Rami was gone.

  “He got tired of waiting,” Dimitra said. And then she repeated it, more to herself. Perhaps there was some truth to this, that Rami, knowing he would eventually leave, simply wanted to get it over with. But I think that Rami, caught between his life here and a new life in Germany with his brother and aunt, could not bear an official goodbye. Still, I couldn’t believe he was gone.

  I went to Dimitra and Fady. They were angry at Leila, who had known, but she herself was so upset, inconsolable, sobbing like a toddler, they couldn’t be too angry. And Fady. Fady was bereft. “I knew it would happen, I knew it wasn’t forever,” he kept saying. But even more, they—we—were worried. Who had he gone with, and how? Where was he? Was he safe? It was maddening. Dimitra sent me messages in the middle of the night, worried.

  Three days later, the same day Rami called Dimitra to tell her he’d safely made it—how, exactly, we still do not know—the novelist phoned to tell me two German hikers had found Nefeli’s jeans and T-shirt and the scarf she’d been wearing in her hair, all folded neatly atop a stone, near the edge of a cliff, a short hike from her small cottage. On a large rock she had stenciled a blue scorpion. It had not rained for weeks, the wind had been still, and one of those scorpion-women had been scorched into the ground. Nearby the ground smoldered, but the hikers put it out before it became a fire.

  But she herself had vanished. As if she had alighted into air: from body to vapor, from earth to sky.

  I asked the novelist what the church would do if it were a suicide. “Easy,” he said. “It’s not a suicide.” “And the body?” I asked. “Don’t worry,” he said.

  I dreamt of scorpions again, skittering across the floor, scurrying over my torso, my back. I woke sweating, my heart racing, and went outside to look at the moon, cold as marble. But I was relieved to be alone. I glanced at my phone. A new message from Rami: a photo of the sketchbook I’d given him before he’d ever shown me his drawings. Then another: a silly little stuffed panda I’d also given him: first perched on a skateboard, then sitting in a café chair, then another looking out a windowsill at the rain. Watch the mail, it said.

  A few days later in the building lobby I found a large box addressed to me, from Germany. A manuscript, a bound photocopy of Rami’s book. The rest was in Arabic and a little bit of English. It remained untitled. There was a Post-it on the front that said, Dear M, Thank you and I hope Fady will read it to you!! Maybe you can help me with a title!

  My heart was pounding. I’d seen sections of it, drawings, a series of frames: kids eating ice cream, kicking a ball around, sitting in desks at school. What I found so impressive was the way he read and rendered faces, the subtle way the slant of an eyebrow could show surprise or fear or anger or laughter, the way a flick of a smile could be full of subtext. But I had not seen him finish a story, give something a beginning, middle, and end.

  The story was about a group of friends, a boy named Rami at their center, whose homes were, day by day, disappearing. First went their school. They arrived one day to the gymnasium and it was gone. But Rami never resorts to realism: the school was not destroyed by bombs or shells or even natural disaster. Each day more disappeared until he pictured only an empty landscape, as if the structure had never existed at all. No trace of books or pens or chalkboards, no computers or broken windows. Just cleanly excised from the landscape; only bitter orange and loquat trees remained.

  And then the language disappears. Images: kids roaming the city, watching movies, painting a mural on the movie house—the girl with the thick black glasses signs her name in Greek—and then the movie house disappears too. Video games whose landscapes look just like their own. Then houses begin to disappear, some of the children opening apartment doors to find only air, nothing behind the gates, beyond their gardens, maybe only a stray toy strewn on the ground until the buildings are gone. When Rami realizes he is alone with the city, along with the girl with the black glasses, neither of them returns home. They don’t want to see. We see the pair walking away from the city, to a place we do not know. A small toy panda peeks out from the girl’s backpack.

  I sat with the book for hours, reading it front to b
ack, back to front, paging through, often settling for fifteen minutes on just one image. By instinct, I pulled out my phone to text Nefeli, and was hit again by the ache of loss.

  When Nefeli disappeared, instead of the documentary footage juxtaposed with scenes from the outdoors, the screen displayed only words—photographed images of pages from her journals dating back to 1970; photos of the graffiti outside her studio; fragments of laments, more texts from poems. Other days only a few words from Cavafy’s unfinished poem “Hidden.” As if she’d planned it all.

  •

  My mother stood next to me at Nefeli’s funeral. My father next to her, very still, looking straight ahead, but a relaxed expression on his face, as if he were watching a good movie or reading. He glanced at me, his eyes so deep and calm. I turned behind me to look at the faces, past and present; so many people in various states of shock and grief.

  My mother kept turning to face me, nearly mischievous, as if she wanted to talk. She had candies in her purse and she was fussing with them, unwrapping them. She touched my cheek, she wiped my tears. Her eyelashes, with mascara, were curled; her thick hair cut to her shoulders with only a hint of gray. Her young self, in a sense, but in her good black dress, her current haircut.

  My father, to her right, was exactly the self I’d remembered before he’d died; he even wore the new maroon sweater I’d bought him for his birthday. Dimitra and Leila and Fady lined up too. Leila’s eyebrows were brown again, but she’d dyed a blue streak in her hair. Dimitra, behind me, kept her hand on my shoulder.

  We owe the dead a lot.

  What we knew: Each day Nefeli went up the hill behind her cottage, past the beehives, past the old church, past the point where the earth was scorched and black, and worked on her installation, a companion piece to the one in Athens—another larger, cruder-looking megaphone she built from wood, from two-by-fours. She had met a few young men at the port looking for work. They helped carve the wood, treat it, I imagine. She had always made friends instantly.

  I went back to the island, and it took me most of the morning to find it in those hills.

  Larger than the megaphones of the exhibit, this one pointed straight upward. For a moment I wondered whether she had installed a camera inside, to project the passing clouds on those screens at the museum. But this wasn’t the point, I knew. Nefeli wanted this out here, removed, silently pointing up to the limitless sky.

  There was no note. This was what remained.

  I sat on the ground amid tiny purple flowers, scrubby grass, sunbaked earth. There was a breeze, and I swear I could hear the eerie harmonies I’d heard down by the sails. I listened closely, to see if I could distinguish the sounds playing in my mind from those outside of it, but it did not matter. I sprawled out beneath her structure and lay still for an hour, nearly feeling her hand in the small of my back again. By the time I stood to leave, my eyes were red and my face was puffy, and I don’t know if I felt better or simply different.

  Eventually others would visit it as well.

  Later we’d hear from the local builder—a young guy who played music in the clubs at night, his voice like butter—that he’d delivered the supplies for her with a dump truck, shared his tools, helped her and Nikos build. Some days he brought them sandwiches. Often he came back for her, to pick her up, to take her there, when Nikos did not. As plain as day. I talked to him and his father, the owner of the business, one late afternoon at Thanassis’s. They found her together, her body, that is, as they were driving around in the truck with Nikos. No wonder Nikos was so distressed.

  My god. I missed her.

  One night back in Athens I had dinner with Fady and Dimitra, and Leila came out of her bedroom holding her phone, showed us Rami’s earnest face. He’d dyed his hair blue, too. We waved and talked excitedly, and when she went back into her bedroom to continue the conversation the three of us cried.

  Later, Leila described his new apartment, his new city, that he said he was still waiting for the sun to come out but otherwise he liked it. After spending so many years in such bright light, the grayness was hard to get used to. He got along with his cousins, his aunt, his brother, but Leila said he wanted to talk about Athens. Leila saw I’d been crying and she gave me a hug, her own eyes wet with tears. “He misses you,” she said. “You know what he told me? That you look like his mother.”

  Then, that evening, Aris called me.

  The novelist had been planning a big party on the island for his seventy-fifth birthday. I assumed this was why Aris was calling. I had planned to go but had not considered the complications. The novelist himself had said he wasn’t really in the mood.

  “Mira?” Aris’s voice quivered. I knew him so well on the phone: after all those years, it had become our greatest intimacy.

  “Hi, Aris,” I said. I kept my voice low, gentle. Something was wrong. There was silence, and he then began to sob. How can I explain to you how I felt at that moment? I did not feel rancor or spite or jealousy. Whatever I felt of that was long gone. I felt a great warmth, to be honest. I may have been angry at Aris, and hurt by the breakup that felt so sudden, but I realized I had already forgiven him, forgiven him the way you’d forgive a parent who frequently disappoints you. Despite the pain, it was the right thing between us, to part ways. I think that accounts for so many problems between people. The insistence that there should be no pain. For me he became mentor, parent, lover, friend. But even with all that, or maybe because of all that, little room remained for that mysterious, continuous thing.

  The knot in my throat blocked me from speaking. The truth of life is always stranger than the truth of fiction, and all this I’m telling you is true. I listened to Aris sob into the phone. It seemed the right thing to do. It seemed the right thing, period, talking to him right after he had held his daughter for the first time. This was love, too: so open and generous and alive. There are so many ways to love. How is it we have only one word for it? I might not have been his great love, if there was such a thing. That was okay. The demand for reciprocity was bizarre, insane. And impossible.

  “Eva’s okay?” I asked. It was the first time I had said her name.

  “Exhausted, but okay,” he said. “C-section.”

  “You’re at the hospital now?” I asked.

  “She’s so tiny.”

  “How wonderful,” I said, and I truly meant it. As if all those years together were still leading up to this moment.

  “Mi mou,” he said. He hadn’t used this nickname in months, years. So much in those words. I am frightened I am sorry I am overjoyed I am alive.

  “It’s okay, Ari mou,” I said. “Se filo.”

  20

  The Captain

  After Nefeli’s funeral the day was bright. I saw Mira up ahead, a small figure in black. Her hair was a bit lighter now, perhaps from the sun, worn in an elaborate braid wrapped around her head, the way Ifigenia sometimes wore hers to soccer practice. Behind her, I saw the journalist-singer and her husband, their daughter. I wondered what had happened to the boy whom I know Mira loved.

  “Hi, you,” I said. I leaned in to greet her with a kiss on each cheek. When I touched her waist I felt something flutter inside me.

  “Hi,” she said, as she pulled away. Her lip trembled. She did not say It’s been a long time, and I was grateful. Her usual self, her serious face, as if I greeted her at funerals every day.

  There were hundreds there, it seemed. I caught a glimpse of Aris with his father across the crowd. My father refused to come: I don’t think he could accept it. He wanted to keep her there, with him, up in the house, her megaphone up on the hill. When I spoke to him the night before, though he seemed bewildered, I understood that he had loved Nefeli, and even though she did not love him in the same way, she loved him too. Losing her was more painful than I had previously understood. They were both difficult people, which made people fall in love with them left and right.

  I did not want to say It’s good to see you. I wanted to say May her m
emory be eternal, but I did not. “Let’s go somewhere,” I said instead. “Let’s have a beer.”

  Her eyes were red. She glanced back at her friends. “Later today?” she said.

  We agreed to meet not right at the port but at an old café a bit farther away, on the water next to a small beach, where my father’s friend Minas kept his old fishing boat.

  I arrived first and sat in the shade. I was alone in the café, and on the beach next to it a young woman and her dog played with a stick. When Mira arrived she didn’t say anything but instead sat right down and smiled. It felt odd to be sitting across from her like that, facing her. The waiter smiled at Mira as if they shared a secret. We ordered beers, the waiter brought pistachios. We spoke.

  When it began to rain, something strange happened. We both instinctively moved our chairs to the long end of the table, which was covered under the awning. As if choreographed. The sea facing us. At that moment she turned sideways, and smiled. Conspiratorial. Then she turned her head back to the water. Together we stared out into that openness, continuing our conversation, side by side, as if nothing had happened, but of course everything had.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I would like to express my deep appreciation to my brilliant editor, Masie Cochran, and also to Elizabeth DeMeo, Molly Templeton, Nanci McCloskey, and the rest of the fantastic team at Tin House for their warmth, incisive editing, and attention. Thank you to Aniko Aliyeva and Diane Chonette for the wonderful artwork and design. I’m grateful to Amy Williams for believing in this book from the start.

  I first began thinking about this project at The Camargo Foundation in Cassis, France, and I’m grateful to my co-residents for their encouragement, insight, and advice. Thank you to the MacDowell Colony, the Can Cab Literary Residence, and the Sozopol Fiction Seminars for providing such warm, invigorating communities. I am indebted to the Fulbright Program for the time and support. I was awarded grants from Wayne State University’s Office of the Vice President for Research and the Office of the Provost to complete this work. Early work on this book was made possible by grants from the Weiser Center for Emerging Democracies at the University of Michigan and the Center for Russian, Eastern European, and Eurasian Studies at the University of Michigan’s International Institute.