Of course I hadn’t seen any of this. I had simply imagined it to be true. I’d only seen them interact twice. First, that night at the taverna, when they quickly disappeared behind the grape trellises, into the alley. And again while I watched from my Athens balcony. Yet I remembered these things as if I were recalling his memory. As if I were he. As if I were there.
I quietly went out to my father’s balcony and looked over the valley, lit up by the moon.
11
Mira
Nefeli did not attend her own opening. She did not acknowledge the flowers we sent the morning of, nor did she respond to any of our messages, as though the show she’d worked so hard to complete was not happening at all.
When I arrived at the museum, people were clustered outside—talking, smoking. I found Fady and Dimitra and the kids. Leila had dressed the part of a young artist herself, with her dark glasses, her black clothing. Rami wore pressed jeans and a pressed paisley shirt, a blue sport coat, his hair all messed up with product (Leila, no doubt), and new heavy-framed glasses just like Fady’s.
“Hey, handsome,” I said, and Rami grinned his toothy grin. I took a picture of Fady and Rami, their arms around each other, now looking very seriously at the camera.
On the side of the museum, WELCOME was painted in a dozen languages, which was not part of Nefeli’s installation but provided an interesting juxtaposition—all that earnestness. But her installation comprised a dozen bright-red megaphones, each the height of an old phone booth or a kiosk, which lined the sidewalk in front of the building and then the road. I wasn’t sure what they were constructed of—wooden frames with painted, papier-mâché exteriors, I guessed. They each held a camera to film street activity, projecting the images to a room filled with screens in the gallery. A few other megaphones were installed across the city: near the university, in a square in Petralona, and outside the Victoria train station. These contemporary street images were being juxtaposed with historical news footage. It was a project about surveillance and protest, and also the distortion of time and sound—the manipulation of sound through time. And, as Fady added, the silence of the current moment. The megaphones, whose bells faced the sidewalk, captured images rather than projecting sound.
Wandering along the line of megaphones, weaving between the guests with their cocktails, I wondered who was watching us inside. What moment in history this moment of mine was superimposed upon. Somewhere within the museum I wandered through time.
The gallery inside was crowded as well, and despite Nefeli’s absence, the mood was celebratory. But we kept watching the door for her. Leila and Rami drifted ahead of us as Fady and Dimitra reintroduced me to several of their friends. As I watched Rami walk away, I noticed the worry beads in his back pocket.
Eventually I drifted away from the conversation myself. In the corner of one of the rooms stood a gaggle of young artists who were in love with Nefeli; the church paintings on the island where she was exiled as a student during the junta had recently gained a small cultlike status. One was a self-portrait that Leila stood in front of, studying. “You can’t do a self-portrait until you’re fifty,” Nefeli had always told me, though she admitted to many in her early career. Acts of self-involvement, she said, rather than self-assertion. Here, the eyebrows on Nefeli’s face were blue, and when you looked closely you could see they were actually scorpions.
In another room were the soundscapes Fady had worked on with Nefeli, which activated when you walked through the seemingly empty room, though in some places the sounds were distinct and in others they were overlaid—something about cones of sound. I found Rami here, wandering slowly back and forth, and together we listened to the sounds of laughter and children playing and the tinny calls of the paliatzís, the shouts of men in the laiki. High heels tapping on marble, the screech and rumble of the metro. Chants of protesters and chants of the liturgy.
After an hour or so, Fady and Dimitra said they were ready to leave—the kids had homework—but I lingered. I suppose I had begun to feel an anxiety about Nefeli’s absence, still hoping she’d make a late appearance, knowing deep down, of course, that she wouldn’t. I walked back through the gallery a few times, particularly taken with the soundscapes. I asked around, but still no one had seen her. I knew deep down that her absence was part of the show itself.
I was in the largest gallery room, with the megaphone projection screens, when Dimitra, Fady, and the kids walked past the installation outside, Rami looking down at his shoes, smiling, listening to Leila talk with her hands. Then, they all stopped to look at something not in the frame. I felt a pang of nostalgia for something I couldn’t name. A sense of something missing.
On the screen I watched Dimitra talk in animated silence while Fady and Leila and Rami listened intently, their faces tilted sideways at the same exact angle. What was interesting about this footage was that the backgrounds kept changing; you might see the same images but never in the same order. Fady said Nefeli had programmed the footage film loops to continue to splice in new ones. Now the screen backdrop was the Polytechnic tanks. When they disappeared from view, the backdrop changed to a scene of South African apartheid. Then footage of hundreds of Bosnian refugees walking a dirt road.
Then suddenly there was Nefeli. Standing close to one of the cameras so it captured her alone. But I realized that I had no idea when this had taken place, because I’d been startled to see myself just a few moments ago. One minute I’d been watching Fady, Dimitra, and the kids depart, and then suddenly there I was arriving with them. Because the footage from this evening on the sidewalk was being added to the historical footage, looped in in random fragments as it accumulated, it was hard to tell at any given moment whether you were, in fact, watching a feed of something outside that had taken place an hour ago, ten minutes ago. So this could have been an image of Nefeli from earlier this evening, or weeks ago as she tested the installation. It could have been right now.
I had done a decent job of not thinking too much about all these absences, those both prevailing and impending, but in the silence of the video installation, in front of that large screen, I felt them. We have our wounds and our desires and they wind around us like unraveling metal sculpture, like barbed wire.
On my way home I walked by her studio. Faint music streamed from her window. The street was dark except for the glow from her studio, as if the only things that mattered were the things inside that large, high-ceilinged space, those old walls, Nefeli still hard at work, racing against time.
PART TWO
12
Mira
June arrived in Greece like the return of a loyal but evasive lover. The early May cold snap I’d been greeted with was now balanced by an early heat wave. But we were invigorated by the warmth before its blankness exhausted us. Sundays we swam, staying at the beach until the sun disappeared, and when we came home we’d sit on someone’s balcony, wanting to extend the day. Temperatures soared. We counted swims. I thought of inviting the Captain to come with us, but I didn’t. He’d be leaving again soon, but I didn’t ask him exactly when.
Athens felt familiar and foreign and hot. The mood was sometimes defiant and sometimes bleak. Refugees continued to arrive on the shores at an alarming rate, so frequently that it unfortunately normalized, became a part of the Greek reality, whereas coverage of it seemed to have disappeared everywhere else. The circus of US politics dominated foreign headlines, Greek ones too. Greeks, meanwhile, remained overwhelmed, and the international media did not know what to say. People posted news stories with a sort of perfunctory numbness. There was a spate of suicides: a woman shooting herself in a public square, another couple jumping from a balcony. I met with an old friend who’d lost her job; she’d moved back in with her parents, near Patras. At least we have the sea, she said, knowing damn well it was not enough. Another friend sold his family apartment to a German couple, who’d rent it out on Airbnb, adding that Airbnb would destroy Athens just as it had Barcelona. He was unwilling to discuss it with me any further. Dimitra’s sister moved in with her best friend, and they taught yoga classes in their living room. It’s the new order of things, was all she said.