My brother came to Greece rarely now. As a younger man he claimed he simply could not afford it, did not have the time, and now his absence was normal. He has always rebelled against my father while at the same time deeply needing his approval. Last year, my nephews, his two sons from his first marriage, showed up with their mother. She, my brother’s ex-wife, recently remarried: another Greek husband, from Crete. This incenses my brother. My nephews say she’s happy. She learned the language a long time ago, when she married my brother, and speaks it fluently with those flat, round vowels, the hard letter ells, the open, lax drawl. She’s a kind, smart, sweet woman, and I’m surprised she fell for my brother in the first place.
My brother had spoken to our father the previous week, he said. He’d mentioned elections, which at first my brother had taken as picking a fight, but it was clear he was not talking about recent or upcoming elections, not in Greece and not in the United States, and my brother had let it go. My father also mentioned helping Nefeli with a project, and my brother didn’t know what he was talking about. “Neither did I,” I said. But what really worried my brother was that my father had asked about the twins, and when my brother said, “No, the twins are Alexi’s,” he’d replied, “Yes, of course. The babies.”
“They’re not babies, Baba,” my brother had said. “The twins are nine, and my sons are in college.”
Our father had laughed. “Obviously,” he’d said. “I still think of them all as babies.”
“Something felt off,” my brother said. “Anyway.”
“Yeah,” I said. “And how are the boys?”
He exhaled loudly, a habit from his earlier smoking days, now a sign of distress. “They’re well,” he said. “Both have girlfriends.” I knew he meant this as some sort of marker of normalcy.
My brother often seemed irritated with his kids, which always baffled me. Last August, when they’d traveled to Crete with several friends, I invited them to come aboard the ship. They flew instead, but when we docked there I met them in Chania for lunch. I hadn’t seen them in several years, and I was expecting arrogant young men with an American sense of superiority. But my nephews were laid back and very sincere. We drank beer together at the old port, sitting in fluffy white chairs, the two of them facing the water. They asked about the twins, about Katerina. They were concerned about the current situation, whether I had encountered smugglers or distressed refugees, whether I’d experienced anything firsthand while at sea. I thought of the dense network of shipping and warehouses, leather jackets from China, racks of cheap clothing that will end up on street markets in Skopje and Tirana and Plovdiv. Illegal stuff: heroin, hash, cocaine. Guns guns guns. Contraband and counterfeit cigarettes. And, of course, people: human traffickers moving bodies across the Aegean, across the Adriatic, into Italy and beyond. Or dropping them off on Crete’s south shores and calling it Italy. I had only wanted to counteract some of that, inject some humanity into the inevitable process of migration.
But I’d lied and told them no, asked about their father.
They looked at me from over their large beer mugs. I could see my brother in them both—heavy brows; wide-set, nearly black eyes like our mother—but how my brother had produced such polite, open-minded boys was beyond me. One studied public policy at the University of Michigan, and, get this, minored in Modern Greek Studies. My brother had told me this on the phone, going through the faculty lists and reading out their research interests with scorn. “And our tax dollars pay for this shit,” he said. I could not reconcile the brother I knew with his disdain for the uneducated, with this attitude. But me, I was impressed with what my nephew was reading, what he knew of recent Greek history. And he was delighted, and slightly baffled, that I’d studied with the same Shakespeare professor decades before. His Greek was correct and elegant, with only a trace of an accent.
My other nephew was pre-med at Ohio State. When I asked him what sort of doctor he’d like to be, he said he’d told his father he’d like to be a surgeon. His brother laughed. They were at such ease with each other, the biggest rift between them their college rivalry, their kindness the most foreign thing about them. He wants to be a personal trainer. That’s what he told me. That my brother would kill him if he knew. “It’s never enough for him,” the younger one said. “And it never will be,” his older brother said. “Just like your grandfather,” I added, and they shrugged, a what can you do. They took a selfie of the three of us and each sent it off to their girlfriends. They invited me out the following night to meet their friends, but I was leaving with the ship the next day. I paid our bill, they thanked me several times, and I went back to work.
A few days later, I was asked by a commanding officer at the shipping company, a man I’d known and liked for years, to leave my post. I was being suspended. And I did not react well. I lost my temper, grabbed his shirt before catching myself and letting go. I had not acted out physically in a very long time, not since I was in my twenties, those years after my mother’s death when even a brush of wind could send me into a rage. When I remember the startled fear on his face I’m filled with shame. He could have pressed charges, called security, reported this, too, to the International Maritime Organization, but instead he calmly told me to gather my things and vacate my cabin. But my fury, shocking to him, was terrifying to me. Later, I called him to apologize for my anger. “It’s a hard time for all of us,” he said.
But there are protocols. My case, complicated as it is, is under review, and though I’m not ready to talk about it I’ll say a few things. I may go into early retirement. Instead of following marine law I took things into my own hands. I suppose I wanted to be a hero. The company is sympathetic but I could have handled things differently, I know. This, the obligation of the office of the captain, hits all aspects of my life. I’m not saying I always honor my obligations. But they are there, and I always feel them. Maybe that’s why I’m having so much trouble accepting Katerina’s desire to split.
My brother knew none of this, and I probably won’t ever tell him. It upsets me, talking of these things. One can only move forward, or try.
Despite his worry about our father, he was in good spirits. I asked him if he’d visit this summer and he grew quiet, said he didn’t have the time, but he’d try to come soon. I knew he would not. While his first wife, the boys’ mother, had fallen so in love with the place and the language, his second wife was less enthusiastic. Seeing Greece through her eyes has given my brother a renewed disdain for it. Their first and only visit was a disaster. She ordered iced tea at dinner, and when the tavernas did not have it she took it as a personal affront. She viewed everything in Athens as though it might be contaminated, was afraid to drink the water, to eat any fruit, to ride the train. She wiped down every surface with little wet cloths she kept in her purse. I wanted to tell him that now she could order any sort of iced tea, that there were organic juice bars and teahouses and vegan restaurants, but I knew that would not be enough.
“Go to the island, see if he’s okay,” my brother said. This surprised me. He had always exhibited such contempt for our father, but I suppose it was an inverse sort of guilt disguised as resentment. Me, I was the opposite, masking resentment with guilt.