I told him they were very good, and he smiled. But he became distracted by his phone, sending messages to his brother in Berlin. He looked up at me suddenly, as if he’d read something on his phone he wanted to tell me, and asked when I’d go back to the States. I told him I didn’t know. This seemed to surprise him—it surprised me too, saying it out loud, since I had always left by the middle of August. When my parents had been alive I’d felt a heavy, unspoken obligation to live close to them: no more than a two-hour plane ride away. I had always been the parent, had always played the role they should have played with me. Perhaps it’s why I’d never had the urge to have children. Not really, anyway.
Whereas the return to the States always felt like a natural, bittersweet part of my life, the cycle of the school year and the summer, the thought of going back to the States now felt flat-out depressing. It had never been easy, my departure signaling not only a return to the States and a goodbye to Aris and all my friends here, but also a return to the grind of classes, the endless e-mails, the university politics, an academic life obsessed with who worked the most, where productivity was not a quality but a virtue, and a passive-aggressive bullying that seemed to define my department’s primary means of communication—a life I myself had worked so hard to obtain. The six years in graduate school, a postdoc, and finally a tenure-track job that always seemed like a dream, something that happened to other people. All the while my connection to Greece on a parallel and sometimes intersecting track: my dissertation-turned-book had been about women’s experiences of the junta. Somehow, having Aris remain here in Athens, and the solid connection of my parents, comforted me. Now, the thought of being away from Greece felt unbearable, unfathomable, as if it could all slip away from me, and my life in the States felt as though it belonged to someone else. I watched Rami paging through his sketchbook. What would it be like, to not go back at all? To stay here, in Athens, or at least in Europe? There were universities, institutes, think tanks. Maybe I could find something.
More than ever, I felt deeply connected to the grit and beauty of Athens, coupled with the ghostly world of my memory and imagination. Say what you will about it—this country’s structure of feeling was not one of isolation. America was a very lonely place.
Rami showed me a series of drawings, thumbnails. Most were of his neighborhood in Damascus, the first he’d mentioned it. Fady and Dimitra’s large flat was much like his flat in Damascus, he said, the orange trees on the street, the smells, the balcony that wound around the entire building. I asked if he missed it, and he shrugged, said yes, he missed his friends, his classes and teachers, the particular place he liked to go after school for a snack. “It’s part of your novel?” I asked.
“Maybe,” he said, and smiled. I was worried this talk of home would have upset him, but I think equally upsetting was the idea that this life, too, was temporary. It pained me that his world, his emotional landscape, was so beyond my knowledge, and I was torn between feeling that I could do only so much for him, we could do only so much for him, and the nagging sensation that we could do everything, could do so much more.
I worked on my laptop and Rami read a graphic novel I’d brought him, every so often interjecting to ask me the meaning of a word. I watched his face, waiting for him to continue our conversation, but he became immersed in his book, and we stayed in the sunny studio for the afternoon, until three, when Dimitra came for Rami, inviting me for lunch.
We walked back to their place, winding around bags of trash on the sidewalk. Dimitra told me about the students she tutored, a side job. Most of them went to the prep school where Aris had also gone: basically, she said, she wrote their college application essays. There was one student in particular, his parents ran a paper company or were big in shipping, she couldn’t remember—“Does it matter?” she asked—who’d told her he’d only apply to Cornell and Berkeley as “backups,” so sure he was he’d get into Princeton or Yale. “Well,” Dimitra said.
We stopped in the pharmacy because both Leila and Rami had allergies. Rami tried to describe in English what it was that made him sneeze, and he switched to Arabic with Dimitra, who was not exactly fluent but could certainly get by, and at this moment I could feel two men glaring at us. I turned and caught one’s eye—provocation, I know. But I wanted them to see the disgust in my face.
When we exited the pharmacy, the two men—black T-shirts, black jeans, shaved heads—moved and stood in the middle of the sidewalk, already narrowed by a tree whose roots had dislodged several paving stones, which jutted out like teeth. Rami did not notice the men or their stares, or perhaps he did and had grown inured to them; he carefully stepped into the street to avoid them and self-consciously switched back to English.
Dimitra followed Rami off the sidewalk, stepping down from the curb. I refused. I held the eye of the larger man as I neared him, calling their bluff, waiting for them to part. But as I passed, one of them shoved me so hard with his shoulder that I lost my footing and stumbled on the broken cobbles, careening headfirst toward the tree. Attempting to catch myself, hands fumbling, I managed to avoid direct impact, but felt the rough bark of the tree against my cheek as I jerked and twisted my head away, inertia carrying me forward, sprawling me onto the pavement.
At first I was so stunned I could only stare at the ground. I tried to sit up, knees and hands still numb and tingling from the impact but already bleeding. “What the fuck,” I shouted.
I drew my hand to my cheek—it felt as though I’d been punched in the face—and felt the ragged scrape from the bark of the tree. I was lucky I hadn’t been knocked unconscious. My fingers came away with bright blood. I thought Rami was going to cry as Dimitra knelt down to help me up. The men watched, as if daring me. Then they turned and walked slowly away.
The pharmacist had heard me shout, heard Dimitra yell after the men, and she came out of the store. She began to assess my injuries, turning my hands over in hers, bending down to inspect my knees, brushing away some of the larger pieces of gravel.
I looked to Dimitra.
“You’re crazy if you think the police will do anything,” she said to me in English, as if reading my thoughts. “They’re on their side.”
The pharmacist brought us back inside and sat me down on a plastic chair. She carefully cleaned my hands and knees, using a pair of tweezers to pull out small bits of glass and gravel. Once she was done sterilizing the abrasions with Betadine, she applied the bandages. Then she brought out a small kit and began to clean my face. I smelled the sharp tang of rubbing alcohol moments before I felt its burn. The pharmacist was talking with Dimitra, telling her I needed stitches, as if I weren’t there. I wondered if I should go the hospital, but the pharmacist seemed skillful, albeit a bit gruff. I winced as she numbed my cheek, prepared the needle. Rami cringed, unable to watch, and waited at the other end of the pharmacy, anxiously flipping through his drawings.
“You don’t know what it’s like here, in this neighborhood, with all the foreigners,” the pharmacist said. I couldn’t tell if she was offering this as an explanation or rebuke, whether she felt what had happened was an unfortunate accident or I’d brought this on myself.
I tried to turn my head, to protest, telling her how they’d tried to force us into the street.