It was only about twenty minutes after everyone had left for the movies that I grabbed my keys and was out the door, driving to the center of the city. When I pulled into my apartment building’s underground parking, I felt my insides swerve. I bought a beer from Sophia, who grinned at me as though betraying involvement in some sort of secret plot. I let myself in, walked across the old floors still wearing my shoes. I opened up the windows to the early evening.
I drank my beer on the balcony, waiting.
And waiting. I went to Sophia and bought another bottle. She was talking to the man who owned the karate place down the way, so I was able to come in and out without interrogation. I returned to my balcony. There was no telling how long I could wait, or what, really, I was waiting for. For all I knew Mira was out of town, or sleeping at a new boyfriend’s; maybe she’d decided to go to the island, too. Athens was becoming unbearably hot.
If she did show up, now, I’d have to leave anyway. Saturday-night traffic: it would take me a while to get back to Kifissia. I’d already pushed my luck. If Katerina was home with the kids before I was, I’d just tell them I went to the local taverna for dinner.
On my way out of the building I ran right into Nefeli. Though I’d attended her exhibit, I hadn’t seen her in years. I still thought of her the way she’d been when I’d been a teenager, she in her late twenties. I’d met her often in Athens with my father. There’s one time in particular that still stands out, the marks of forced exile all over her face. It was winter. Back then, her black hair was longer than any woman’s I’d ever seen, and she wore a thick white turtleneck sweater, a thick headband. All those big layers made her look tiny, fragile, but she had smiled at me, grabbed my cheek. “Does your mother know you’re out?” she asked. She’d called me “little captain” before I was even a captain, but my grandfather had also been a captain and had felt betrayed, I think, by my father’s move to politics. Perhaps I chose it, unconsciously, as a sort of atonement for the sins of my father. My father, of course, took it—took everything—as a slight.
“Have you seen our Myrto today,” she asked.
I had never heard anyone use her Greek name. “Not today,” I said. Unfortunately.
“I need something from her place,” she said. “But I have a key,” she added. She’d lived here for years, after all.
“How’s my father,” I asked. Despite having spent nearly a week on the island, I hadn’t managed to see him. Minas had assured me he was fine, staying at Nefeli’s cabin on the mountain. I had assumed he was with her, but now here she was.
She looked particularly vulnerable and I felt a rush of tenderness toward her. “Oh, he’s fine,” she said, but I didn’t believe her. I think she must have realized this because she asked if I understood what was happening to him. “His mind, it’s not the same. But we understand one another. We share the same fears,” she said.
“The same fears,” I repeated, hoping she’d elaborate. She didn’t. I told her I was going to the island again, this time for the summer. She said she was returning soon as well. And probably not coming back.
“Until winter?”
“Not coming back,” she said.
I didn’t know what to say, so I waited for her to speak again. Her comments had rattled me. “Oh, don’t worry about him,” she said at last. “It’s only melancholia.” Then she tipped her head, as if trying to see me from a different angle. “What is it that defines you?” she asked.
I didn’t know what she was talking about, and when I hesitated she waved her hand between us, as if dismissing what hung there. When I hugged her goodbye I could feel her delicate bones beneath her sleeveless black shirt, like the tiny bones of a quail.
Driving home, Nefeli’s question loomed large in my mind. Two things, for many years, have defined me as a man: the sea and my marriage. As imperfect as my relationship with Katerina has been—though I do believe that the definition of a relationship is imperfect; it was something I’d read somewhere when I was a student and had returned to the island after a painful breakup—I did not know who I would be without her. Take my life at sea out of the equation and I was an empty shell, needing reconstitution. But with what materials? Who was I before Katerina? Before the sea? I’d have to go so far back as university, studying literature, the pleasure of the language, the young guy who kicked the soccer ball along the beach while the young Aris watched, both of us dreaming of what might lie ahead. Yet I studied engineering anyway, then returned for my military service, and the navy. So instead of disappearing into words, I escaped into the sea, a different place of the imagination. And now I seemed to be escaping again—not to the sea but away from it.
The apartment, then, which I’d previously seen as an escape, a liminal space between my domestic life in Kifissia and my solitary life at sea, had become the place I’d begun to redefine myself. I’d come to love it the way I loved that island village where my father has made his home, a place I’d never felt landlocked but instead as if I were soaring above the earth.
And somehow this had to do with Mira. That night, as I was falling asleep, it occurred to me with a sort of urgency that the balcony allowed us to be two things, to occupy two places, at once. The meeting in the metaxi, the in-between, the what-if. It was a limbo, but one in which I strangely felt whole in the split.
•
We reached the island just after noon. Usually the kids were anxious to swim, but today they were moody and inconsolable. Ifigenia had refused to pack her bag at home, and Katerina, exasperated and knowing we’d miss the boat, did it for her. Nikos texted his friends the entire time, wanting to continue some video game they played together online. I didn’t know there was such a thing, and when I mentioned that to Katerina, she looked startled that such important details of his life I had only just now realized.
The house near the port had been purchased by my father years ago for me and my brother, with the plan that each of us would spend as much time as we could there with our families. Though neither of us had a great relationship with him, it pained him that we, his sons, were not closer with each other. My father’s house in the village couldn’t accommodate all the children, nor was it near the water where they always wanted to be. However, since my brother never visited Greece, the house felt like ours.
When we arrived, we went through the usual rituals: refilling the refrigerator with groceries from the port, putting the fresh towels in the bathroom and the sheets on the bed. There was a particular smell to the island house—stone and sea and small lavender soaps shaped like seashells that sat in a dish next to shells the twins had collected—evoking in me such wild nostalgia that I decided I would need to leave sooner than I had anticipated.
The kids were in their room, getting ready to go to the beach. I told them I needed to see my father, that I was going to stay with him. I felt ashamed; they were not idiots. Of course they knew that their parents’ marriage was not a normal one, and their sad, downturned lips broke my heart. “Okay, Dad,” they said.
I hugged Katerina at the door.
When I told her several days ago that I felt it best if I stayed at my father’s until she returned to Brussels, we’d fought. There would be no way to forestall the conversation with the children, which she feared would ruin their summer. And I felt torn, of course, wanting to do what was best for them. Yet the minute I’d seen the island come into view from the bow of the ferry, I knew I couldn’t do it. It would be too painful. In Athens, I had learned to live my split lives. But not here.