Yet the emotion I felt at the moment was less sadness than shame. Ashamed because I had assumed my half presence in Katerina’s life would be enough, ashamed that I had failed. And devastated because I did love her, and if she had been giving me clues to try to repair the marriage, as she claimed, I had missed them. I had let her down, just as I’d let down all the others. To continue this attachment was purely prolonging what had to come.
I suppose my father stayed with Nefeli because he was lonely, but it was unbearable to imagine my father’s loneliness. According to Nefeli, he liked to be around her while she created something. His bees were just down the road from her cottage, and she said that sometimes, when she was working, she’d stand on her roof and see him down there, moving slowly with his beekeeper hat and gloves, going about his routine. He’d begun making beeswax candles, brewing honey wine, gardening. So many things I could not imagine.
My father asked me to meet him at Thanassis’s, but when I arrived he was not there, which was not unlike him. My father not only expected me to come to him but also to wait, even when he was young and I was overwhelmed with the twins. But now, he was difficult to find. When was the last time I’d actually seen him? The past year for me was a blur.
I was not meeting with my father for any sort of reckoning; I did not expect to suddenly shift our relationship. Once it’s solidified in its habits, which it had, years and years ago, we can only hope for its best possible version. But as I’d walked from my car to the center of the village, I decided I’d tell him Katerina and I were splitting. Otherwise, he’d wonder why I wasn’t staying with them, and I surely didn’t want him to think I thought he needed supervision. Did he?
Whether as buffer, foil, or insurance in case he decided not to show up, my father had invited Minas to join us. He welcomed me, poured me some raki, offered me some little marinated fish. Minas lived in the village in the winter but fished in the warmer months, when he lived in a small house, nearly a shack, not far from the shore. I had hoped he’d give me greater insight into my father, his recent behavior, but like many others of his generation they refused to speak of such things, a sort of self-preservation of dignity to not disclose the wreckage of aging. My chest felt tight, and I don’t know if it was anger or a bruised tenderness or something in between.
“What’s wrong with you?” Minas asked.
I didn’t answer, of course. I felt tense. I remembered what Mira had said about my father, about consciousness and memory as the story of a self, even if the story seems muddled or confusing.
“Your father is coming, don’t worry,” Minas said, and this affection, this man of his generation covering for him, smoothing over his forgetfulness, broke my heart. But soon my father indeed appeared, in dark jeans and a light denim shirt, his thick hair combed back like an actor’s, cigarettes in his front shirt pocket. He had a tan and wore a beard, which he hadn’t in years. He looked startlingly handsome.
I stood, and I was surprised that my father hugged me, and tightly. He was an affectionate man overall, but rarely with me. Not since I’d been a boy. It’s as though he was forgetting his habits, his resentments, his way of being in the world. “You look good,” I said.
He pulled at his shirt collar. “A gift from Nefeli,” he said, beaming.
Minas called him a handsome fucker and my father said: “Well, at least I still have my looks.” His expression clouded for a moment, but then they both broke into laughter, the two of them laughing as though it were the funniest thing in the world.
•
Later, when I told my father about Katerina, he had not reacted the way I’d expected. Instead, he put his hand on my arm and asked if I was okay, if I needed anything. He asked if he could call Katerina and I said yes, of course. I slept at his house that night, and he did too, following me into my room and talking to me awhile at the edge of the bed, like he might have done once or twice when I was a child. I woke in the night to hear him through the wall, talking in his sleep, long paragraphs I could not decipher, as if he were giving a speech.
The next evening, I went to see the kids and Katerina for dinner. After, the twins had gone with friends to the outdoor cinema a few blocks away, so we were alone. I told Katerina my father was no longer a man I recognized. He was a different person. But to himself, he was the self he always was; I don’t think he recognized the difference. Her lip quivered, and she burst into tears. I followed her into the bathroom, where she sat atop the toilet seat, and I put my hand on her head. “Don’t worry,” I said. “He’ll be okay.” Katerina had always loved him, I knew. She hugged her face to my hip. “I know,” she said. “It’s not that.”
I sat down on the floor, my feet up on the tub’s ledge. “I need to see where this goes,” she said. “I will regret it if I don’t.” At first I thought she was talking about us, about our marriage, and my heart soared. But then I realized she was talking about someone, something, else. She curled into me, and we stayed like that awhile. Finally, she stood up, washed her face, and I knew it was time for me to go. It was then that she said, “I wish it could all be more—I don’t know. I wish it could all be more.” She kept apologizing, and I could see she was in deep pain, but mostly I knew that the pain was because I, somehow, had abandoned her first.
14
Mira
We woke to the news of the vandalism. Fady called early in the morning to tell me the story, which was not much of a story but simply an event, a series of details that he kept repeating as if some sense might arise from their recitation. Over the night, vandals had destroyed the megaphone installation, those outside the museum and the few around the city. I insisted we go have a look, try to clean it up. Nefeli, of course, didn’t respond to our calls or messages.
We went anyway, Fady and Dimitra and I. A crowd of young people had already gathered, wanting to clean it up, to restore it. The long line of megaphones that lined the walkway headed to the museum, that circled the entrance, had been kicked in, holes punched through, covered with graffiti. The cameras, interestingly, had not been disturbed, though it had happened in the middle of the night and they were not on.
Dimitra told them to wait, to see what Nefeli wanted. They all stopped what they were doing and looked at us as if we were all crazy. I’m sure when we’d turn away they’d shoot photos of themselves there, their smooth-skinned faces lighting up each other’s screens. One woman—dyed black hair, heavy boots, velvet leggings despite the heat, the rest of her slight, sweet looking—asked if she was sure, said that Nefeli was allowing herself to be silenced.
“Let it be, please,” Dimitra said.
“But what about expression,” another asked.
“Expression,” Dimitra said, the register of her voice shifting, as if Nefeli were speaking through her. “Whose expression?” As if the first time hearing the words, trying them out on her tongue. “Is that what you think art is for?”
•
Nefeli sold five new paintings, just like that. The vandalism had given her new street cred. Oddly enough, all this had temporarily invigorated her, given her work another element, another chapter. But none of us saw her. She responded to texts, but sporadically. Yet she was aware of the attention. She did a radio interview, and one of the arts-and-culture magazines wrote a feature on her, but she refused to appear in public. Fady spliced some of her interview comments into the soundscape. Her voice, disembodied this way, was eerier than I could ever have imagined: