Instinctively you found the Monastiraki metro station, but everything was different there too. Signs in English and the platforms were clean. There were even automatic ticket machines. A magazine kiosk in the center of the station had Internet access. Half of the magazines were in English.
You stepped through the orange doors of the train in the direction of Kifissia. There was an empty seat but you didn’t sit down.
A young couple boarded a few stops later at Omonia. They kissed in front of everyone. His face was thin and red. She had gold hoop earrings. He was almost two feet taller than her. When they stopped kissing, he caressed her hair. People watched without watching.
Soon, you would arrive at her door.
As the train neared her station you thought of that woman dead with the glass in her face—lines of blood running down like red coral, the bricks of the fallen wall like loaves of bread.
Sitting in the Athens airport terminal, you knew you would go there. It’s why you stayed. Going back to where everything happened would bring you closer to her.
You imagined her at the door, walking up steps or sitting on the wall with a book. Life would fill in the details of sound, texture, and light. We have the power to conjure presence but not life.
And your heart thumped with the anticipation of what wouldn’t happen.
The subway train slowed as it approached her station, but didn’t stop. People looked at each other.
Nobody knew why the train wasn’t stopping.
You flew through the doors at the next station breathing hard. Then you walked quickly in the direction you came from. A vendor outside the station was selling pink plastic hairdryers. A dozen small girls were pleading with their mothers. The vendor was drying plums in a towel. A group of cats foraged in an open trash can.
You got closer and closer to her apartment—but not in the way you had anticipated. You were returning from a new direction. There was a broken tree branch in the road. Children were jumping on it—trying to tear it from the trunk. You walked parallel to the train tracks for another ten minutes until you saw a building with the sign sante written in blue. By then you knew where you were. It was time to hold your breath and dive.
A scooter ripped past. For a moment you imagined that you were going to find out that she was alive—that for two years she had been mourning your death. You wondered if ghosts return to the places they went before they died. Do they sit beside fountains and remember? Do they perch unseen at the edges of cribs, staring down at the sleeping creatures they can never know?
Ancient Greek tombstones were carved in the shape of a last action. A mother handing over her infant to someone living. A father waving good-bye to his living sons. A woman reaching out to her husband who has been waiting in the afterlife—he stands at her approach.
You imagined Rebecca carved into a square of stone.
She was holding hands with you and with George, but she had no face—for the face is a memory one cannot will in its entirety.
Then suddenly you were on her street. You looked up, and in all the madness of grief, you expected to see her on the balcony waiting for you.
Chapter Forty-Five
Her building was gone. Every last trace of it erased. In its place, a block of condos with narrow windows, fifteen stories high. The balconies had black railings. The fabric awnings matched the color of the steel. There were no tattered, threadbare sheets blowing off rusted balconies in the late-day sun. No sleeping dogs in the doorway. And the dead and dying flowers had been replaced by tidy rows of hard green plastic shrubs.
There was parking underneath. A sign said so. The front door looked heavy. A camera and video monitor saved people a trip to the balcony.
You had expected to still see the tents, pieces of rubble, abandoned vehicles, the glow of small fires.
Then you looked down at your feet and noticed ants everywhere.
They were crawling up your legs. You stepped away and brushed them off. Then you left.
Everything had changed except you.
You passed the taverna where smoking men once played backgammon. In its place was a sleek, modern café with a dozen flat-screen televisions. Old men sat on stools doing scratch-cards and watching numbers change on an electronic board. Teenagers sat before plastic tables pressing buttons on mobile phones. The old marble counter had been replaced with a round glass kiosk from which a face looked out. The old men drank coffee out of plastic cups. Dusty strip lighting had been replaced with the bright buzz of new strip lighting.
You continued walking. The moon was weak and flat.
There was graffiti scrawled on a low wall crumbling dangerously at the top. You walked over and laid a palm on it. From within, the faint thud of a city you once loved.
You stopped outside a restaurant Rebecca once took you to.
Through the window you noticed the main seating area seemed to be shut down. Chairs were stacked upon the tables. Tools and debris lay on fabric sheets in corners where you and Rebecca once sat on straw chairs and talked late into the night. She liked to smoke your cigarettes. There were dumpsters along her street then, and dogs sleeping under them. Stray cats balanced at the edges of bins left open. They stepped carefully, without sound.
The man inside, next to the revolving meat, eyed you with suspicion. You entered and asked for a souvlaka. He tilted his head and took a pita from the stack. He turned his body to the meat and carved a few pieces. Then he wrapped the meat with french fries and yogurt in the pita and handed it to you in a paper cone.
You asked if you could sit down. He nodded in the Greek way that means no.
You hesitated.
“Look,” he said, pointing with his knife to the mountain of boxes, old computers, and plastic containers that littered the place where you once were in love.
You ate standing up beside the door. People pushed past you. The sandwich was sweet and barely warm. Each mouthful was a painful effort. After, you bought cigarettes from a kiosk and walked back to her apartment. You smoked one after another on the steps, even though you hadn’t smoked for two years. You lay down and cried noiselessly into your hand.
It was dark when your eyes opened. You had been asleep. Someone was poking you. Two policemen. One with a truncheon said something. The other laughed. He then asked you in English what you were doing.
“I was asleep,” you said.
“Do you live here?” the one without the truncheon said, using it to point at the balconies.
“I did once.”
They exchanged a few words and then listened to something on their radios. They seemed less interested in you now.
The one without the truncheon took out a pad of paper. “Do you have an apartment or hotel here in Athens?”
You nodded.
“Do you have any identification papers?”
“At my hotel.”
“Then let’s go.”
They picked you up and led you off to a small blue police car. They put you in the backseat and then got into the front. They both lit cigarettes and talked quickly in a Greek you didn’t understand.
The one with the truncheon was driving. The other one looked at you in his mirror.
“There’s someone you wanted to see?”
“Yes,” you said. The cigarettes made you feel sick.
They were both looking at you, suddenly unsure of how to proceed.
“Who?” the driver said. His contempt had changed to genuine curiosity.
“A girl who lived there.”
“Wasn’t she home?”
“She doesn’t live there anymore.”
They nodded.
“I just miss her, is all.”
“Greek girls are hard to love,” the driver said, “especially for foreigners.”
One of them offered you a cigarette. You smoked it and felt worse.
When you got to the hotel, they told you to get out.
“What about my identification papers?”
“Forget i
t.”
You locked your hotel room door and shed your clothes. Then you sat naked in the bathtub. You turned on the taps, but they spat only lukewarm water. Then the water turned cold. A rash of spots appeared on your legs and stomach.
You reached up and turned everything off. Then you sat in a few inches of cold water, shivering. The strip lighting brought out red veins in your face. Your hands were dark from the sun. There was dirt under your nails. You wanted to get out but couldn’t move.
Then a steady feeling that your stomach was rising into your throat. Your hands shook. A blazing hotness. You rose from the freezing water but slipped and fell hard on the marble tiles. Then you vomited with a long wretched growl.
The floor was covered. Your arms were covered.
The smell was like a bitter fire. You vomited again. You felt pieces in your nose. Your throat was burning.
Your body was rejecting the city that conceived you.
Your life now would be in how you wished to imagine it.
The past must be created as something new.
END OF BOOK TWO
Alone, most strangely, I live on.
—Rupert Brooke
BOOK THREE
Chapter Forty-Six
When you awake, you know that you have to leave but don’t know where to go.
Eighteen hours have passed, and you’re tired of being asleep.
You’ve almost run out of money and you have no one to ask for help.
You sit up in bed. You drink all the water from the minibar and then eat the almonds and the pistachios, throwing the shells into an empty glass. You can smell vomit.
You look at your briefcase and your dusty suit on the floor. Then you realize that the worst has already happened.
You clean up the vomit in the bathroom. Then you shower. Your nose has formed neat scabs on the inside.
You shave with the plastic razor and for some reason start thinking about some museum that George talked about when he came to visit you in hospital. It was a museum of wonder, he said, a museum of lost things, a museum that wasn’t planned, but built slowly from the discovery of beautiful pieces recovered from the sea.
You want to see it. Then you will decide what to do with your life.
You imagine the faces of the fishermen as they free a piece of marble from the nets.
You slip from the hotel into bright light. Athens has changed again.
The streets, once cracked and sinister, are now swept with warmth. You can feel it settling on your arms and face.
A sense of poise.
Tourists are smiling at you.
Vendors call gaily from their stalls, and you begin to understand, with a sense of relief, that overnight you have become a visitor.
Athens is embracing you for the first time, like a kind, rich woman who has failed to recognize her own child from the broken days of her youth.
You take the metro from Monastiraki; this time you are going in the opposite direction. It’s quicker than you remember, and cleaner.
The station at Piraeus has a roof now. The platform is swept. A uniformed railway employee answers questions and asks people with luggage where they are going. Tourists will remember Athens as a place where people were helpful.
You alight, stepping over the gap between the platform and the train. A stray dog wanders in to greet you.
You walk out from the station into the main square. It’s very busy. North African men are selling pocketbooks on the street. The pocketbooks sit on a bedsheet, their handles wrapped in plastic.
You buy a coffee and some heavy cake from a café. As you eat, a woman in black comes by with a cup, but you look away. She sighs loudly and walks off. You remember George. He’ll be frantic, but this is something you must do alone.
You ask two old men on a bench where the museum is. They don’t speak English and just nod their heads. Then you ask in broken Greek and get the same response.
A woman on the church steps doesn’t know either. She’s typing something on her phone but doesn’t know where the letters are. Her finger circles the keypad as though she is casting a spell.
A man on an upside-down bucket is selling small tubes of glue from a folding table. On the table are things glued together.
He doesn’t know where the museum is but asks if anything you have is broken.
“Everything,” you say in Greek. He puts a tube of glue in your hands. You hold out a few coins, but he pushes them away.
You wander through a bustling market. Enormous fish laid out on ice. Some have twisted bodies. Smaller fish are being scooped into cones of paper.
Then you see animals hanging over bright red spotlights behind glass cases, their entrails unfolded for inspection.
Greek men shout at you to come over. A very short man sings as you pass. You turn toward his voice, and he takes your hand and leads you to his fish. He has very small feet.
You stand and look at his fish lined up on the ice. He smiles and smiles until you point to a small fish and say, “Okay.”
He wraps it up for you and then, winking, throws in a baby octopus. You pay and ask him where the museum is.
He’s never heard of it, but the fish come from his brother.
You keep walking, deeper and deeper into the chaos of the Athenian port. You ask a dozen people—even taxi drivers—how to get to the museum, but no one has ever heard of a museum for lost things.
You turn to walk back the way you came, still carrying a meal you can’t eat. But you no longer recognize the streets you came down. You stand still, while everything around you is moving.
You sit in the shade at the edge of a park; a handsome man with sunglasses suddenly appears. He asks gently in Greek if you’re lost. He has perfect fingernails and smooth hands. He is about to get on a large BMW motorcycle that’s parked next to your bench. His suit is a deep gray and his graying hair combed perfectly to one side.
You explain that you’re looking for the museum of lost things.
“The museum of Piraeus?”
You nod weakly.
“Turn around,” he says.
Behind you is a small sign with an arrow pointing to a long white building. It says MUSEUM in Greek.
Then he gets on his motorcycle. You watch him drive away—wishing he had stayed. You think of George. He doesn’t even know you’re here. He’s somewhere in Sicily, drinking coffee on his balcony, in love again, sweeping up the dust that blows around the city.
Chapter Forty-Seven
A smoking woman with long nails asks if you want to leave your bag at the desk. When you say no, she asks what’s in it.
“One small fish and an octopus.”
She looks at you strangely.
“I don’t even have a kitchen at my hotel,” you add.
“Then why did you buy it?”
“Because I felt sorry for the fish man.”
She says something to the security guard in Greek and then laughs. But he shrugs and looks at you, not with amusement but with respect—as though he were once a struggling fish man.
The first floor has sculptures that were pulled from the sea. You can tell because the stone resembles a hard gray sponge.
Some cases hold just limbs. Some are green with moss.
Then you wander through a room of gravestones that were discovered at a marine dump by an Albanian laborer. The stones have scenes carved into them.
The final moments of a life imagined by the tired carver.
The dead stare at the living in the full knowledge they have lost their lives. The faces are not detailed because the Greeks understood that one person’s experience is everyone’s.
We all sit down to the same meal, but at different times.
Carved upon one of the graves, a woman called Eirene from the city of Byzantium has died in childbirth. In the relief, her infant daughter is held by the relative who will raise her. Eirene reaches out her hand to touch her child for the first and last time.
In another carving,
a man called Andron shakes the hand of a son already dead, and with his other hand touches the cheek of a son who is still living.
The security guard from the front desk is following you at a distance. You are the only visitor in the museum.
Upstairs is a room with three towering bronze statues. They have greened with age—though details are still visible. Each god has an outstretched hand. You sit and look at them for a long time.
You can’t decide if the hands are giving or taking away.
After you vomited in the bathroom last night in the hotel, you cried for several hours on the floor—but then somehow awoke in a different city. Overnight, the set upon which you had played out your small tragedy was taken down and replaced with new scenery.
In the next room is a frieze that leaves you gasping.
A fragment of your life has been cast in marble before your very eyes.
A young woman on a bed has died. She is watched by two men and a child. Asklepios, the Greek god of medicine, stands above the woman with his hands on her neck and back. He is bringing her back to life. The two men and the child watch.
Asklepios’s own mother died while he was still in her womb. But Asklepios’s father fought the flames of his wife’s funeral pyre with a knife between his teeth. Then he sliced open her stomach and ripped out his unborn son.
Growing up, the boy realized he had the ability to heal. His power grew until one day he could bring the dead back to life. For this, Zeus destroyed him with a thunderbolt.
You think of your own father. You imagine the swell of your mother’s womb, the stirring waters as you leave one world for another.
It seems pointless imagining what your brother would be like, because he died when he was a baby.
Things in your mind are shuffling into order.
And you realize that you’ve finally grown up. That youth has finished. In its place you have knowledge, which you must learn to carry. You must also learn to accept that death is the most sophisticated form of beauty, and the most difficult to accept.
From this moment on, you will always be conscious of what you are doing. And any future feeling, whether joy or grief or excitement or regret, will come now with an awareness of its own end—with shadows you never noticed in youth. Variation of feeling will become depth of feeling. And you will appreciate tiny things—and step with the confidence of someone overjoyed to know he is doomed.
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