I told him I was going soon for a christening, and we hung up.
Whereas my brother has always been on the offensive with our father, I am forever on the defense. What surprised me most was the disgust my father had expressed, when I was younger, regarding my decision to stay at sea. You’re escaping, you’re running away, and this to him was unacceptable. Get a job closer to home. Get a job on land. Our relationship had always been difficult—as a teenager I’d confronted him about his infidelities—so to see him take on the persona of a virtuous family man filled me with a mix of sadness and rage.
But the thing is, he did see himself as a family man, one who never abandoned his wife and children. Not for the love of another woman, not for a sense of independence. In this way he saw himself as loyal, as sacrificing other lives for the one he’d first chosen. To him it was the way of the world, the world of men, and he maintained both a fierce no one will tell me what to do attitude along with a deep sense of obligation.
Despite our differences, we share a nostalgia for the future—a dangerous, optimistic longing for what could be. It’s what kept him in politics and what has kept me afloat.
6
Mira
Those first weeks I was in Athens, Nefeli, working hard for her opening, sometimes behaved the way she had that night out with Fady and Dimitra—unagitated, full of warmth. Other times, she acted strangely, as she had that day at the beach, speaking in non sequiturs or circles. Irascible. From time to time she was uncharacteristically quiet. Sometimes she stayed up all night in her studio, but it wasn’t until after her show opened that I really began to worry.
But until the opening, when she wanted a break from working, I’d meet her at the new coffee shop several blocks from her studio, the one with the goat logo. I was calmed by the minimalist space, even its unapologetic trendiness, and when I walked in with Nefeli the baristas’ faces lit up. I’d never seen her studio, which was in an old building that she and a few other artists used as a workspace. It was too private, she said, like offering a glimpse into the mechanisms of her mind. Only Fady had been there, but she made him promise not to utter a word about the project. Her reticence was born less of self-importance than it was of superstition.
But that morning, Nefeli had asked me to meet her at her studio. She had a few things she wanted to bring and needed help carrying them. I’d woken late, so I hurriedly dressed and stopped at my corner bakery for a coffee to drink on the way. It was one of my true Americanisms, walking through the city with a drink, which drove Nefeli crazy. I loved Athens in the morning: the way the early light hits the streets, the scent of butter and sugar from the bakeries, the crowded coffee shops with the lively chatter and the smell of smoke.
Nefeli’s studio was not far from the small experimental theater on Mavromichali, past the old movie house, past her favorite taverna, and fairly close to her apartment. Most of the homes were old beauties, some bright and well-kept and others in various stages of disrepair. One seemed like it had been burned in a fire, and the next was fit for a magazine photo shoot. Nefeli’s building, though, was a large, three-story, gray corner structure I had walked by many times, noticing it mostly for the interesting street art that covered the walls: black-and-white Soviet-style drawings. On another wall was some stenciling: DEAR CAPITALISM, IT’S NOT YOU, IT’S ME. JUST KIDDING, IT’S YOU. IT’S OVER. The front door was huge, industrial, like you’d find at a loading dock, and I rang the bell twice. I wandered around the corner to see if there was another entrance; on the side of the building someone had spray-painted, in Greek: NO HOPE. And below that, in English: FUCK MY DESIRE.
From the open window on the top floor I could hear music, and finally Nefeli came out to the small balcony and said she’d buzz me in. Her face was bright; creating something, to her, was the antidote to despair, and no matter what else was going on, when she was working, she glowed. There were two doors on the bottom floor: one was a dance studio, and the other door was unmarked. When I reached the third-floor landing, Nefeli was standing in front of her door. She wore baggy jeans and a white T-shirt, her hair pulled back in a blue scarf.
“No peeking,” she said, deliberately leaving the door open a crack so I could. She was in good spirits. The ceilings were high, and the space was huge. Behind her was a large table, scattered on it dozens of little blue scorpions, ceramic, with distorted limbs. I found them disconcerting. She slipped behind another dividing wall, which was where she was building the components of the installation, and emerged in a clean shirt, holding overflowing tote bags. She handed me one filled with school supplies and another with flip-flops in various sizes and colors.
The squat, as Nefeli and Fady and Dimitra referred to it, as well as those living there, was not far from the studio. It was an abandoned school turned into housing for recent arrivals, a cooperation between the refugees themselves, mostly from Afghanistan, Syria, and Iraq, and local anarchists and activists, depending on whom you asked. Nefeli was proud of the work being done there, and she wanted to show it to me. She thought it would be useful for my new project—one I admittedly had not yet started—on grassroots organizing from the eighties until now.
From the outside of the school, the tall cement walls, the steps going up, you’d imagine it to be filled with the voices of schoolchildren, which it was. Nefeli led me into the courtyard, where we were met by Nadine, an animated young woman dressed in various shades of mauve and plum, perfect eyebrows. That summer everyone’s eyebrows seemed full and alive.
She clapped her hands together and smiled when she saw the bags of notebooks, the packets of blue Bic pens, the colored pencils, the markers for a dry-erase board. Nefeli quickly introduced us and took some of the materials and disappeared behind a door off the courtyard, where she ran a drawing class for teenagers and adults. In another room off the courtyard a meeting was in progress: men and women discussing, in English, the labor rights of immigrants and refugees, and a man stood in front of the room, interpreting. Later that night, Nadine said, the room would be used for a dance class. Through the window of another room I could see children from the ages of eight to twelve settling in to the desks: these were children who, most of them recent arrivals, had not yet been enrolled in Greek schools. The first lesson of the day, according to Nadine, would start soon: math. One girl sat on a bench, reading, while another behind her braided her hair. A third sat at the desk, vigorously erasing something in her notebook.
Nearby, some women sat on a blanket, holding toddlers. One younger woman painted the nails of another, and on a nearby bench an older woman read a novel, holding it at arm’s length.
From across the courtyard a lanky older boy approached us. He held an infant no more than a year old, dressed in a pressed white oxford shirt, little blue shorts, and light-blue socks, his eyelashes like giant fans. In this new context it took me a moment to register that the older boy was Rami. He smiled, a big toothy grin, recognizing me from the other night. Because he was not in school, Dimitra had arranged various homeschool options for him. During his off-hours he came here with Fady or Dimitra, helping with this and that: acting as a babysitter, even a translator for the younger kids, or disappearing into the corridors with the older boys, which made Fady nervous, but Dimitra insisted he’d be fine. Rami’s spoken English was already excellent, and next week we’d start writing lessons together, per Dimitra’s request.