The men at the squat were virtually absent, but the older boys, some nearly young men themselves, hung out in the back of the courtyard, away from the women and the children, and though Rami looked young for his age, at least to me, I could tell now that he was more one of them than he was of the kids who sprawled across blankets, drawing pictures and making crafts, writing with bright-colored chalk, waiting for their morning lessons to begin. Perhaps these kids were used to strangers dropping in as volunteers, and they eyed me shyly.
Rami watched, too, holding the baby facing out. He kicked his chubby legs and looked around the courtyard agreeably, as if taking in any new place, as if he’d just been dressed up one morning on his way to a family wedding and, by some glitch in time and space, ended up here. Which was about right. “Do you want him?” Rami asked, now extending him in front of me.
The little boy laughed when I took him in my arms, looking back toward Rami with a calm, taciturn expression. Rami put his hand on his hip, proud of himself. “He likes to see out,” Rami explained.
“You’re a natural,” I told him, shifting the boy around. Rami said a few words to him in Arabic and he smiled, and then I began to whisper a little Greek rhyme in his ear and he remained transfixed. “I’m going to join my friends now,” Rami politely said, “but maybe I’ll see you soon?” I nodded and he disappeared with the others, all of them too old for that first class, I guessed.
The little boy stayed on my hip, happily looking around, but suddenly I felt ridiculous. What, exactly, was I doing there? Whose child was this? When I’d gone to places where I did not belong, as ethnographer, I allowed myself a certain sense of entitlement, however misguided or false it may have been. I allowed myself that sort of deep hanging out that my work entailed. But just as myself, as Nefeli’s tagalong, I felt like an intruder. Then a young woman in chic dark jeans and a blue blouse, a blue paisley headscarf, hurried over to me and gently took the boy back in her arms, thanking me in Greek. Only then, seeing his mother’s distress at temporarily losing track of him, did he burst into tears. But soon he was giggling again, shrieking with joy. She kissed his nose and, along with two other women and a little girl wearing a pink backpack, disappeared out the front door, on their way somewhere else.
After Nadine opened the door of the classroom and called to the children, who stood to join her, the courtyard grew fairly quiet. I went to find Nefeli. I peered into her classroom but she was not there. I opened the door and saw the tote bags. A young man with dark, curly hair sat at a desk alone, writing in a small black notebook. “I’m sorry to disturb you,” I said, in English, and asked where Nefeli was. He shrugged and said he didn’t know.
It seemed wrong to walk down the corridors—families lived in classrooms. I walked to the front of the building to see if Nefeli was there and instead ran into Dimitra, who was rushing in to pick up Rami. She was surprised to see me and greeted me warmly. “But where is Nefeli?” she asked. “I tried to call her but she didn’t pick up.”
On the walk home, we stopped outside her studio and rang the bell. Another woman answered, her jeans covered in paint, and said she hadn’t seen her. As we continued up the street, I turned back and spotted Nefeli on her studio’s balcony, her hand up to her forehead, blocking the sun and watching us walk away. A few minutes later, she replied: Sorry, M. Class actually tomorrow. Forgot you had come with me.
Earlier, I’d asked her about her show: a huge undertaking, both new, never-before-seen installation work—which was what Fady was helping her with as a sound engineer—and a retrospective of her paintings. The latter she described the way one would talk about shedding skin; though the foundation of her career had been in canvas, her new three-dimensional projects were what she was currently most engaged in. Yet she didn’t see this transition as leaving one medium behind for another. This was the reason for the mixed show. What she wanted, she said, was to allow time to fold in on itself.
Rami walked ahead, wearing giant headphones, and I told this all to Dimitra. About her forgetting me at the squat, about the way she talked about her work. “It’s like she’s living in a slightly altered reality, one the rest of us enter and leave.”
“How strange,” Dimitra said, and sighed.
7
Mira
The weather grew warmer. There was a garbage strike. Bright-colored trash bags filled the curbs and alleyways, and we stepped over their overflowing contents and avoided the blocks that were unnavigable. We talked about which stretches were particularly foul—a stretch along Plateia Mavili, or the entire top end of Monastiraki. Athinas had become a sea of trash, and Omonia was worse, so we avoided it completely. I was relieved my balcony faced the courtyard and not the street. Still, we went out. There was not much that could keep Athenians indoors.
My late-night conversations with the Captain continued, a natural part of my evenings, a sort of self-narration for us both. Our stories intertwined like a double helix. He spoke to me in both English and Greek, as if he were still deciding which of his selves to be with me, as if I were somehow defining that self. Then, as though the vastness of the sea had swallowed him up, he’d be silent for a few days, and then he’d continue a conversation I had all but forgotten. Getting to know him felt both wild and a little strange, and I became aware of him the way I’m aware of sun on my face: particularly noticeable when eclipsed by a cloud.
We stayed on our own balconies, but he’d sometimes pass a cigarette to me; one night we shared a few bottles of beer, and another night, when I’d made stuffed tomatoes and peppers, I offered him one on a little plate. These were the only times I saw his face.
Those evening conversations felt like entering a confessional: the priest probably knew who sat behind the wall but in the public light of day would never acknowledge it as fact. And, as upon exiting a confessional, in the light I felt both unburdened and a little uncertain. Not that I had tumbled out of the dark of a confessional since I was thirteen years old, my last year in Catholic school, even though we were not Catholic.
Though I’d told him about my parents, the Captain asked me very little else about my past, about Aris, about the two serious relationships I’d had before him, and the string of less-serious ones in between, and I followed suit. Questions like that can come across as demanding. Instead, I told him my present: about Rami—his love of art and comics; his desire to be a writer; the way he’d asked, the other day, how you knew where to begin a story; the way I’d hugged him before I could attempt an answer. I told him about Dimitra and Fady, and Nefeli too, working on her exhibition.
One night, at the mention of Nefeli’s name, the Captain grew quiet. It was after eleven, and we spoke quietly. I knew she was close with his father, who he said appeared to be missing. He said this in a nonchalant way, as though his father often went missing. Appeared to be missing. I thought of the phrase. He’d spoken with his father’s doctor and friends, he said. I asked if he was concerned and he said he’d go to the island soon. A friend’s daughter’s christening. He’d look in on him then. He’d grown used to his father disappearing over the years—spontaneous trips to Crete or Rome, though he never left southern Europe—and he was less worried about this silence than what the silence might imply. It wasn’t the state of his absence, but the condition of it. The Captain said he’d notified the island police, but they had laughed and told him to relax.