Since her show had opened, Nefeli had grown particularly agitated, constantly wanting to adjust things, showing up at the museum in the middle of the night, asking the guards to let her in, calling the curator to shift things around, calling Fady to edit the sound, constantly splicing new things into the video. Nefeli was in a constant state of revision. It was as if her show were a living, growing, breathing thing. This, of course, made it all the more interesting, with people stopping in every few days to see what had changed. And it was getting excellent reviews. New images appeared on the screens: bright-orange background with the lines from a poet, dead now for some twenty years: our flags in tatters, with and without wind, no fire left in our hearts. She’d befriended him years ago. Take water with you / the future will be dry.
And the attention was international. The BBC did a feature on her, and the footage of Nefeli and the male British reporter walking through the megaphones was spliced into the video footage too. The European papers had all mentioned her show, including her absence at the opening, and all this both enraged the Greeks (why does she get all the foreign attention?) and filled them with pride (she’s one of ours!).
One evening I rode home with the same taxi driver I’d had when I first arrived in Athens, when he first dropped me off at the apartment. This was not so unusual, but it felt, somehow, momentous. He recognized me and was talkative. The name of my street translates to “Of Warriors and Thieves”—Armatolon kai Klefton. The word for “sinners” is close to the word for “warriors”—just the transposing of two consonants—and I think even those who knew their history, that the armatoloi kai kleftoi were key figures during Ottoman rule, seemed to mishear it. The taxi driver asked me if I was a sinner, and I repeated the street name. “Yes, yes,” he said. “I know. But ‘sinners’ rolls off the tongue faster.” I forced a laugh.
The driver, maybe hearing my accent, told me he’d lived many years in New York and completely reinvented himself there, and when he returned to Athens he had to do it all over again.
I understood this need for reinvention. My father had done so brilliantly. My mother could not, but her old self could also not exist in the new place. For a while, I think, those first years in the United States, my mother was fighting something, on the verge of escape: from her body, from her mind. And somewhere in there, between the time I was five and twelve, she surrendered, began to damage her body as if to kill that other self. And when my teen years arrived, she began to sense a wildness in me, a desire to get out, go up, move away. She began to see that I had a body too. And if she did not feel outright hate, it was resentment, and I don’t know which is worse. She left Greece because she had felt she had to, whereas she saw my leaving home as a choice—and that offended her, just the way my changing body offended her. I didn’t tell all this to the driver, of course, but I told it later that night, to the Captain.
There was a lot of traffic, and the taxi driver concentrated on the road. We drove the rest of the way home in silence, save for his taking a few calls. When we pulled up to my building he looked at me in his rearview mirror. “You’re Greek,” he asked. “Right?”
I didn’t bother with “Greek American.” Obviously, he figured this. I thanked him and got out of the car. He told me to take care of myself.
When I was growing up in Chicago it was not unusual for people to ask: What are you? They wanted your ethnic identity, and I never thought much of it; where I grew up, we were all from somewhere else, so the question was more curious than critical. But there was an element of racism to it. Here, I’d done it myself on the metro, seen teenagers of most likely Chinese or Nigerian heritage, say, and first thought they were American tourists until I heard them speaking Greek with the mannerisms and gestures of native-born speakers, until I realized they were most likely native speakers. And I’ve seen people try to place Fady’s origins. Asking about his name, where he went to school, puzzled at his elegant, refined Greek. He studied in Paris, he always says; he grew up there. It’s not that he is rejecting his past, it’s that he resists this quiet aggression, that somehow he owes people his story, owes them one solid, unchanging identity. He feels both Greek and not-Greek, he speaks Greek, and that is enough.
Me, I don’t know what I felt. I didn’t not feel Greek. I did not feel particularly American either, but I felt comfortable in my outsiderness. Maybe this was a function of Americanness, or whiteness, to feel one can go anywhere and belong. I certainly didn’t feel Greek American. In Chicago I’d associated this only with church and Greek school. After my mother witnessed me, at a rehearsal, commemorate a historical event that involved falling to our deaths, she became enraged. “I don’t want the village to follow me,” she said, and I was yanked out before I had had the chance to jump from the stage, an act I had really been looking forward to. When we got home she took a washcloth and vigorously scrubbed all the makeup off my face. My mother, so anxious that she might be rejected, was always the one to reject first. She and Nefeli were a lot alike.
I asked her once, after a discussion with my friends—all of us with immigrant parents, or immigrants ourselves, Ukrainian and Lebanese and Indian and Korean—if we were white. She answered without hesitation. “No,” she said, as if I were an idiot. “We’re Greek.” She was begging the question, but I dropped it.
“I could spend the rest of my life trying to understand her,” I told the Captain.
“Have you ever written about her?” he asked.
I told him I’d only written about people who’d explicitly given me permission. People I came to know under the pretext of writing about them. As I said it I felt a little uneasy.
He was quiet for a moment. “So you don’t really come to know them. Only who they’re showing themselves to be.”
I put my head down in my hands, suddenly dizzy, light-headed. I could no longer be a cipher for other people’s stories—not in the academic context. It was too difficult to not acknowledge how I changed the space. Even listening is not passive, but it’s not as though I’d show up and listen. I spent weeks, months, years, even, building relationships. When I finished the oral histories, the most interesting things were the things I remembered, those things that had passed between us: a glance of knowing between the two of us, the long process of establishing friendship and trust, the moments spent laughing and crying. A hand held, a political fight, an inappropriate crush, a surprising loss. Those were the things I wanted to write. I did not mention my own parents, who also lived through the junta, who married when it was over, had me, and, five years later, left Greece for good.
I am certainly not the first to have had this feeling, but it has begun to weigh on me. My dissertation involved collecting oral histories from the junta, and my first book the stories of women specifically, from prison camp survivors to sympathizers of the regime. I am happy I wrote it. But compiling all these stories, arranging them, editing them—it was more art than scholarship. It’s why I was so thrilled when Svetlana Alexievich won the Nobel for Literature, an acknowledgment that imagination was as much a part of what we did as what a novelist does, an acknowledgment of living with all those voices, a human ear, she called herself, carrying them with her.