“Are you there,” I asked, to no one.
Back inside, I moved closer to Nefeli’s painting and in the near darkness noticed something blue next to the figure of a woman, on the floor. I stared at it a long time, and its outlines seemed to sharpen. I had never paid attention to it before, but now in the dark I was sure it was a scorpion. In the corner, near the balcony door, my mother slept upright in my reading chair, her glasses resting on her chest.
When I woke up I returned to the painting. The blue was just a splash of color. Nothing more.
When I’d moved into this apartment it had felt nearly blank. I knew I had lived here and I had remembered certain moments: the way the window in the kitchen looked into another person’s kitchen in the next building, the sound of the elevator, the wash of light in the living room in the morning, the violent spin of the washing machine, the echo of voices in the stairwell. But there had been something collapsed about it. The longer I stayed the longer I felt the web of interconnections filling it back with breath: me, my parents, the Captain, Nefeli, Haroula, Rami, Leila, Dimitra, Fady.
When I went down to check my mail—something I did religiously in Chicago but often would forget for days in Athens, as if I were somehow unreachable—I found a letter addressed to the Captain that had been mistakenly placed in my box. I held it in my hand like it was a small, delicate animal. I read his name out loud, acknowledging his identity as something far outside of myself, outside our intersections. I am unable to rectify his given name with the man who speaks to me, conversations so hushed and intimate they nearly feel like talks with myself.
Heavy sleep. Shadow dreams of Greek school. Morning rehearsals of a performance, cider and donuts, the only reason I liked to go. All the children were asked to come up to the stage, but I kept eating my French cruller, quite happily, and looking over at my mother, smiling at all the kids swarming to the front. Somehow I did not think I was one of them, and my mother waved me to go too, and I was alarmed. I climbed onto the stage, now my older self, walked past the children, and slipped through the heavy velvet curtain, which led me to my balcony, where the Captain waited for me.
15
Mira
When I came to Athens for my parents’ burial I didn’t make it to the island. Despite the shock of winter green, the bleak wind and stillness would have been too much. Now, my first trip back, the ferry moved through the mist like a phantom voyage. But within an hour the weather had cleared and I sat on the top deck, my face to the sun. For a short while I forgot myself and felt content.
Then, as the first island began to appear on the horizon, I felt a returning creep of dread. Six months earlier my parents were still alive. Five months earlier I’d still been with Aris, wandering through his Plaka apartment in a daze, comforted by his presence, his tenderness then. Eva would have already been pregnant. What had he told her? An old friend had come to stay? His girlfriend, in fact, but no, the timing was wrong for telling her?
From the island port, it’s a fifteen-minute walk to the house. On the way was a small parking lot, and only then did I notice my parents’ old flat-nosed Fiat. My mother drove that car all around the island, my father in the passenger seat, chatting. Most of the time, I realize only now, she was probably drunk, or well on her way.
To return to a place again and again is to confront the sneaky passing of time. Here I am at fifteen, at twenty-five, at twenty-nine, at thirty-nine. What of those earlier selves is left in me?
Our narrow street was deserted. I pulled my suitcase up the steep incline and climbed the stairs to our red front door. I don’t know why, but I knocked. When I was a child I used to come to our own door and ask, in Greek, if the American girl could come out to play, and I think there was a part of me that hoped I would appear from the inside of the house, my own double. Now I hesitated under the stone archway, fumbled for the key, and let myself in.
What always hit me the hardest was the smell: the wool of the rugs that hung on the walls, the white flokati on the tile floor. When the place hadn’t been aired out it smelled slightly of mold, which held a comforting familiarity, though Kyria Voula, who cared for me when I was a child, must have recently been by because the windows were open.
I opened drawers and cupboards. Whereas the flat in Athens had been mostly stripped of my parents, save for those few reminders, a few things in the storage closet, the memory of the rooftop, they were everywhere here. In the top-left cabinet I found the briki—my father only drank Greek coffee, and luckily there were plenty of places near our home in Chicago to indulge his particularly endearing snobbery—and the water glasses, the small blue tumblers for juice. On the other side stood the whiskey glasses, and behind them the plastic cups I used as a child. The other cupboard held my father’s various bottles of tsipouro and behind them my mother’s arsenal: vodka, bourbon, gin.
As I waited for coffee to boil, I opened the linen closet and put my face to a soft white pillowcase dotted with small blue flowers. Behind the clean towels I noticed some glass and retrieved an almost-empty whiskey bottle, as if my mother had told herself that if she didn’t polish it off, she had barely had any at all.
I don’t know why I thought I’d be alone in this house. I texted Nefeli, wondering if she were here, but got no response. Part of the reason I’d come to the island was to look for her. And partly because my apartment had felt so empty without my nightly conversations with the Captain.
Soon I collapsed onto my small double bed and didn’t move for an hour, exhausted from all the grief that seemed to exponentially compound with each new event, each new addition. I wanted to empty myself of it.
I took a fresh towel from the closet and unwrapped an olive oil soap. In the mirror I saw the pattern from the woven blanket imprinted in my cheek. I forgot to first turn on the hot-water heater, so I froze in the shower. Still, after, I felt a bit better, though the weight of all those physical reminders of loss had exhausted me.
Everything leaves its mark.
Fortunately, by then, it was night.
•
The next day I drove to have lunch with Aris’s father, the novelist, who lived in the mountain village at the top of the island. I had been first introduced to him as “the novelist” and it’s how I, and many others, still referred to him. We’d had a friendship prior to the one I’d had with Aris, from back when I was writing my dissertation. So it didn’t strike me as particularly strange that he’d extend the invitation; it was hard to remain anonymous here. At the same time, driving up the winding mountain road, it felt as though I’d been summoned for a goodbye.
I left my car at the village’s edge—you could not drive through the narrow passages, and because of this, the little streets into the village felt like corridors, the doors opening to rooms of one giant dwelling. You reach a sweet little overlook and quickly realize it’s a private terrace.
The village felt clear and still, so different from the hectic ambiance near the port, from the beaches with their bars and tavernas. And after the bustle and noise and smells of Athens, it felt like another planet, with the island mountain stillness, the shock of bright flowers, the echoes from inside the dwellings nestled into the hills. It’s a particular type of mountain repose, one I haven’t felt anywhere else in the world.