“No,” I said, letting out a weak laugh. Alone? “Not alone. Thank you. I’m done.” I turned to face the door but we were indeed now alone.
He pulled the door open, grinding it against the cement floor. I walked down the stairs ahead of him again, aware of him close behind me, aware of his eyes on my back. My shoulder blades tingled. At our doorways we greeted each other goodbye.
“You sure you’re okay?” he asked.
I nodded. “Didn’t sleep much last night.”
•
Let me return now to that memory of my parents. Right before we moved, nearly thirty-five years ago. So I am five and my father finds my mother and me on the roof and whisks me away, leaving her there with her small green tumbler of something or other. My mother comes back into the kitchen fifteen minutes later, where I’m drawing at the table, a dismissive look on her face. I feel as though I’ve done something wrong, and I cry all evening. My father’s silence penetrates the house. “She needs to be more careful,” is all he says to me.
This is how I see it still. Like a film.
Or maybe it’s that the truest, most defining moments were captured only in my mind, never film, never digital image. Now we capture everything, walk around with a self-awareness so acute that it becomes a lack of one. Look at me look at me look at me don’t look at me.
You capture so much that nothing of your self will be left.
•
They say that children who are exposed to a language as babies always retain that language. That their brains will respond differently to it than non-native speakers, even if they are not able to understand or speak it as adults. I think of Leila and her ease with three languages, four, even, if you count the French she studies at school. But for her, Arabic and Greek will be forever imprinted, the way I suppose Greek is imprinted for me.
Maybe it’s the same for places. I remembered very little about this apartment, and I wonder if what I do remember has come from pictures, or if what I remember has come from memories, but there are a few stark, vivid images that remain lodged in my mind. When I had shut the door behind me that morning, despite the earlier unpleasant memory, holding my coffee that had grown cold, I felt oddly impervious.
A few days after that incident on the roof—not with the Captain but the childhood incident with my parents—my grandmother scrubbed the hell out of the kitchen with Ajax. My parents were busy packing. I was in the courtyard with my grandfather, and I don’t know why—maybe I had to use the bathroom or wanted something to eat—but we were coming back inside. Whatever the reason, I remember it was a sudden decision.
My mother was sprawled out on the staircase landing: blue dress, brown clogs, one of which had fallen from her foot and down a few more stairs. On the cool marble, my father held her head while my grandmother wiped her face with a towel. There was so much blood. And this: my mother was laughing.
My grandfather held me back. Stay here, he said.
It’s amazing she broke no bones, the doctor said.
I remember my father relaying this to my grandmother. Only the big cut on her forehead, a smaller slash on her cheek. A scar that still remained. Stitches, a few tests, and that was it.
Why was she laughing, I asked. I did not know she was drunk. How could I.
Again. Why was she laughing.
Why.
To make your father know she was okay, my grandmother said to me. That’s all. So we would know she was okay.
Is she okay?
She’s okay, loulouthi mou. She’s okay.
Just an accident, my little mouse, my mother said, home from the hospital. Mama’s okay.
Like a rag doll, my father said.
It’s the first moment of real terror I remember, and for years afterward I’d have nightmares of severed limbs, cuts, bodies bleeding, my father’s fear-stricken face, the same one I saw last summer, when my mother was stung by a scorpion fish while swimming. How much does she drink. I would go into a panic and my father would count to five again while I inhaled and again when I exhaled, until I calmed down. He did it with my mother, too, when her moments of such intense anxiety caused her to fling open our back door for a deep gulp of air.
Rarely in our minds are our parents the young adults who brought us into the world, or the vulnerable, aged adults who left us behind. They stay for us in middle age, which might explain why it’s so hard to accept the fact that we ourselves are middle-aged. We have become the age of our parents, the pain of our youth crystallizing into something hard and physical. Bodily. But for all I know, I have created that dress, the vibrant yellow, its intricate red embroidery; I have created the blue one too.
But not the moment. The moment was real. And the music is even truer: I can remember two songs very clearly, both pop songs from the ’70s or maybe ’80s, the same artist, the lithe blonde my mother pointed out to me on the island many many years later, the one who’d briefly married Kazantzidis. She wore a spectacular green dress, and the crowd seemed to part as she walked through with her entourage.
That feeling of invulnerability disappeared quickly, and I spent the rest of the day vaguely agitated. I did several loads of laundry, slightly calmed by the swishing of the washer, the quiet task of hanging up clothes to dry in the sun. Later, I called Nefeli to come over for dinner, but she didn’t pick up.
8
The Captain
I had not been spying on Aris and Mira that day. I knew Aris had been waiting for Mira, but I didn’t realize he was still there. After my shower, though, after making myself some pasta and salad, I walked out to the front balcony, which got the evening sun, and saw them saying goodbye in the street. They were not speaking, only looking at each other. Then Mira turned and walked away. She disappeared around the corner and Aris got into his car. He sat in the car a long time after she had walked away, and the whole image was one I wasn’t able to shake. I had no right to be either jealous or angry. If I had imagined anything between us I had imagined either incorrectly, or inadvisably.
Aris was a good-enough guy, and I have always admired his father. When I had asked Katerina if she knew who Aris had been with before, she said Eva had left another man for Aris, and Aris, as she understood it, had left someone as well. “But listen, he’s not like other politicians.” I don’t know what she based this on. I grew up around these men and this I know for sure: no politician is totally clean, and everything is a political act.
That night, I called my father’s friend Minas. Was he acting out of character? My father was a passionate man, and it’s true he became a little unhinged from time to time. This was no secret.
“Getting old is terrible,” Minas replied. Then he told me not to worry, that he thought my father might be spending time with Nefeli, who had a small cottage up in the hills, not far from his village. Nefeli often worked there, and my father kept some bees on her land.
I felt calmed by this, and thanked him. I told him I’d be coming to the island that weekend for a christening, my friend Dimos’s first child, at fifty-two. I was relieved he didn’t ask if Katerina and the kids were coming. They weren’t.
“I’ll see you then,” Minas said.
I took a walk. A soccer match had just let out and I turned the other direction, toward Exarcheia. The other night on the balcony, Mira said men will never understand the experience of feeling threatened simply by the presence of men. She had walked by the soccer stadium on our street as a match was letting out, a losing one for the home team, and the testosterone, she said, had terrified her. She’d learned early on how to carry herself, how to deal with the masculine bravado that always felt a little bit dangerous. I already see it in Ifigenia, a way of holding herself. It frightens me. Katerina told me that a boy in her class had asked her to dance and she looked at him sharply and asked, “Why are you sweating.”