Still, I could tell he was trying to remember the last time they’d spoken. When I asked Nefeli about the strange, confused comments I’d seen the Captain’s father make on Nefeli’s social media posts, she’d hinted at his beginning stages of dementia. I knew the Captain didn’t see these posts because he was completely absent from the internet, never existed there at all. I hesitated. “I’ve met your father,” I said, and I assumed he knew how.
This was not the first time I had felt a sort of barefaced intimacy between us when such an intimacy seemed impossible, an intimacy that was less comforting than it was destabilizing, as if time had jumbled and we existed both in that present moment and a much later, future one, with a shared history and the ability to understand each other without speaking.
“I feel like a beer,” he said, suddenly. “Want one?”
I didn’t tell him I’d already had two. For a moment I thought he was asking if I wanted to go out somewhere, but I wasn’t sure, so I just said okay, thank you, and waited.
“I’ll be right back,” he said.
I stood to go inside and get some pistachios to share, and for a second I leaned over the divider to have a good look at his balcony. Two chairs, a small table, an ashtray, a large selection of plants, herbs. I recognized the oregano and thyme. From that angle I would have been able to see into his apartment except he hadn’t turned on the light. When he appeared back in the doorway with two glasses he smiled to see me there.
“Hi,” I said. I might as well have been watching him take a shower. That’s how caught I felt.
But he didn’t seem to mind. He handed me a glass of beer and I could feel him take in my entire body: face shoulders chest waist legs. From underneath his T-shirt I could see a glimpse of a tattoo under his sleeve. Nice biceps, nice shoulders. I reached over to touch his arm and thanked him for the beer. We each sat back down, hidden again from the other’s gaze, and I felt desire, melancholy, embarrassment, joy.
“The tattoo I got years ago,” he said.
I laughed. He’d seen me notice. Had I been staring? I took a sip from the small glass. Now what. I shifted in my chair.
“Only one?” I asked.
He told me it covered his left arm, onto his chest.
“Maybe you’ll show me some time,” I said.
He laughed. “Yeah?”
“This beer is great,” I said.
“A pilsner, from Crete. Do you like it?” I could tell by his voice he was smiling, and I was glad he could no longer see me, the surely stupid grin on my face. I said, “Very much.”
•
The front-door key I finally found in the wooden cigar box of keys and notes and coins my parents kept on the highest bookshelf, or maybe Haroula had kept it there. I also found some loose drachmas, and an envelope filled with three hundred euros, which was obviously my mother’s, who hoarded cash all over the house. There was also an extra key to the island house, which I hadn’t been to since before my parents’ deaths—I would go soon, but somehow, leaving Athens made me feel anxious, as if I’d return and this apartment, this balcony, the Captain, would all have disappeared.
Appear to be missing.
Aris had stopped calling, at least for the time being, and his silence was a relief; his absence easier to handle without his constantly picking at the scab. I had become used to the distance between us after all, and with that came a certain leveling of emotions—to be in a constant state of longing, of missing, was too much. When I came across his name in the newspaper, though, voicing support for the strikers or talking about the economy, I felt the hot shame of rejection renewed.
Meanwhile, I talked with Rami about story and graphic novels, which he said he was writing but was not yet ready to show me. He was barely a teenager but his seriousness of purpose was astounding. I spent a lot of time at the squat but often just ran errands: one afternoon, I took several kids from the squat to an eye checkup, and Rami had come along, wearing his own new glasses and holding one of the little girl’s hands. Two American college students who’d been working as volunteers, teaching English, had left abruptly—to them their volunteering was bundled up with vacationing, and the vacationing won—and Dimitra suggested I might fill in. So I showed up two afternoons a week. Afterward, I tutored Rami on his own: it was less like a language class and more like our own little book club. I loved his quick wit—so rare in a language that was one’s second, third—a wit you’d think would belong to a much older boy. Then again, I often thought of Rami as younger than he was.
Some of my suggestions Rami rolled his eyes at: Those are for kids. He wanted more substance: he was writing a book too. But Dimitra had suggested I keep it light. We read together, mostly in English, though he was learning the basics of Greek as well, the way kids just absorb language through their skin. English would be more useful to him, he said, because he was leaving. We’d finished American Born Chinese and The Encyclopedia of Early Earth and were beginning Ms. Marvel and Anya’s Ghost. I’d ordered a slew of graphic novels online. I’d arrange them in front of him and he’d choose the next. He mentioned his brother in Germany often, whom he talked to on video chat; his family was growing anxious, frustrated at the slowness of the system, the failure of the reunification procedures. But he never directly mentioned leaving. Besides, the system all seemed so chaotic, so disordered, that nothing really seemed to matter. He’d left his home, alone, in the middle of a war. He’d made it here; he probably wasn’t worrying too much about the legalities. But he seemed torn. “I love my brother,” he said. “I miss him. But.”
“But?” I asked.
He shrugged.
One afternoon after my class at the squat I waited for Rami, who was late, which was unlike him. I could feel my pulse quicken as I looked around inside. I asked Nadine, who ran the classes for the smaller kids. No one had seen him. Dimitra didn’t answer when I called, so I tried Fady.
He picked up and immediately apologized. “Sorry, lost track of time.” Rami was with him. “Come by the workshop.”
When I arrived, I heard Cretan lute music playing loudly and found the two of them, each seated on one of the ergonomic work stools. Fady was showing Rami how to use a leveler. “What’s this?” I asked. Rami, in turn, demonstrated for me the way to use the tool, explaining what they were working on with an almost rehearsed bravura.
“He’s a natural.” Fady grinned, and Rami shyly shrugged.
This was of course better than idly roaming the city, or sitting in the crammed classroom at the squat with kids of all ages. Fady gave him attention, he spoke to him in Arabic and English and Greek, and he was learning something. “I wasn’t much older when I started apprenticing,” he said.
“I didn’t say anything.”
Later, though, I understood Fady had brought him to the workshop not simply to keep an eye on him but to create yet another connection, that Fady hoped Rami’s interest in instrument-making would somehow further tether him to their lives.
“I cleared this table,” Fady said, his tone shifting now to business. “I have to leave for an hour or two, a shift at the asylum office. You can work here.”
Whereas Leila would pout with any sudden change of plans, Rami was spontaneous, quick with transitions. From his small backpack he pulled out a Staedtler eraser, a few graphite pencils. He opened his sketch pad and, with some prodding from Fady, showed me several of his sketches of the workshop: propped against a beige futon were two cellos in various stages—one brand new, not yet strung, and one in need of bridge repair.