The story was about a group of friends, a boy named Rami at their center, whose homes were, day by day, disappearing. First went their school. They arrived one day to the gymnasium and it was gone. But Rami never resorts to realism: the school was not destroyed by bombs or shells or even natural disaster. Each day more disappeared until he pictured only an empty landscape, as if the structure had never existed at all. No trace of books or pens or chalkboards, no computers or broken windows. Just cleanly excised from the landscape; only bitter orange and loquat trees remained.
And then the language disappears. Images: kids roaming the city, watching movies, painting a mural on the movie house—the girl with the thick black glasses signs her name in Greek—and then the movie house disappears too. Video games whose landscapes look just like their own. Then houses begin to disappear, some of the children opening apartment doors to find only air, nothing behind the gates, beyond their gardens, maybe only a stray toy strewn on the ground until the buildings are gone. When Rami realizes he is alone with the city, along with the girl with the black glasses, neither of them returns home. They don’t want to see. We see the pair walking away from the city, to a place we do not know. A small toy panda peeks out from the girl’s backpack.
I sat with the book for hours, reading it front to back, back to front, paging through, often settling for fifteen minutes on just one image. By instinct, I pulled out my phone to text Nefeli, and was hit again by the ache of loss.
When Nefeli disappeared, instead of the documentary footage juxtaposed with scenes from the outdoors, the screen displayed only words—photographed images of pages from her journals dating back to 1970; photos of the graffiti outside her studio; fragments of laments, more texts from poems. Other days only a few words from Cavafy’s unfinished poem “Hidden.” As if she’d planned it all.
•
My mother stood next to me at Nefeli’s funeral. My father next to her, very still, looking straight ahead, but a relaxed expression on his face, as if he were watching a good movie or reading. He glanced at me, his eyes so deep and calm. I turned behind me to look at the faces, past and present; so many people in various states of shock and grief.
My mother kept turning to face me, nearly mischievous, as if she wanted to talk. She had candies in her purse and she was fussing with them, unwrapping them. She touched my cheek, she wiped my tears. Her eyelashes, with mascara, were curled; her thick hair cut to her shoulders with only a hint of gray. Her young self, in a sense, but in her good black dress, her current haircut.
My father, to her right, was exactly the self I’d remembered before he’d died; he even wore the new maroon sweater I’d bought him for his birthday. Dimitra and Leila and Fady lined up too. Leila’s eyebrows were brown again, but she’d dyed a blue streak in her hair. Dimitra, behind me, kept her hand on my shoulder.
We owe the dead a lot.
What we knew: Each day Nefeli went up the hill behind her cottage, past the beehives, past the old church, past the point where the earth was scorched and black, and worked on her installation, a companion piece to the one in Athens—another larger, cruder-looking megaphone she built from wood, from two-by-fours. She had met a few young men at the port looking for work. They helped carve the wood, treat it, I imagine. She had always made friends instantly.
I went back to the island, and it took me most of the morning to find it in those hills.
Larger than the megaphones of the exhibit, this one pointed straight upward. For a moment I wondered whether she had installed a camera inside, to project the passing clouds on those screens at the museum. But this wasn’t the point, I knew. Nefeli wanted this out here, removed, silently pointing up to the limitless sky.
There was no note. This was what remained.
I sat on the ground amid tiny purple flowers, scrubby grass, sunbaked earth. There was a breeze, and I swear I could hear the eerie harmonies I’d heard down by the sails. I listened closely, to see if I could distinguish the sounds playing in my mind from those outside of it, but it did not matter. I sprawled out beneath her structure and lay still for an hour, nearly feeling her hand in the small of my back again. By the time I stood to leave, my eyes were red and my face was puffy, and I don’t know if I felt better or simply different.
Eventually others would visit it as well.
Later we’d hear from the local builder—a young guy who played music in the clubs at night, his voice like butter—that he’d delivered the supplies for her with a dump truck, shared his tools, helped her and Nikos build. Some days he brought them sandwiches. Often he came back for her, to pick her up, to take her there, when Nikos did not. As plain as day. I talked to him and his father, the owner of the business, one late afternoon at Thanassis’s. They found her together, her body, that is, as they were driving around in the truck with Nikos. No wonder Nikos was so distressed.
My god. I missed her.
One night back in Athens I had dinner with Fady and Dimitra, and Leila came out of her bedroom holding her phone, showed us Rami’s earnest face. He’d dyed his hair blue, too. We waved and talked excitedly, and when she went back into her bedroom to continue the conversation the three of us cried.
Later, Leila described his new apartment, his new city, that he said he was still waiting for the sun to come out but otherwise he liked it. After spending so many years in such bright light, the grayness was hard to get used to. He got along with his cousins, his aunt, his brother, but Leila said he wanted to talk about Athens. Leila saw I’d been crying and she gave me a hug, her own eyes wet with tears. “He misses you,” she said. “You know what he told me? That you look like his mother.”
Then, that evening, Aris called me.
The novelist had been planning a big party on the island for his seventy-fifth birthday. I assumed this was why Aris was calling. I had planned to go but had not considered the complications. The novelist himself had said he wasn’t really in the mood.
“Mira?” Aris’s voice quivered. I knew him so well on the phone: after all those years, it had become our greatest intimacy.
“Hi, Aris,” I said. I kept my voice low, gentle. Something was wrong. There was silence, and he then began to sob. How can I explain to you how I felt at that moment? I did not feel rancor or spite or jealousy. Whatever I felt of that was long gone. I felt a great warmth, to be honest. I may have been angry at Aris, and hurt by the breakup that felt so sudden, but I realized I had already forgiven him, forgiven him the way you’d forgive a parent who frequently disappoints you. Despite the pain, it was the right thing between us, to part ways. I think that accounts for so many problems between people. The insistence that there should be no pain. For me he became mentor, parent, lover, friend. But even with all that, or maybe because of all that, little room remained for that mysterious, continuous thing.
The knot in my throat blocked me from speaking. The truth of life is always stranger than the truth of fiction, and all this I’m telling you is true. I listened to Aris sob into the phone. It seemed the right thing to do. It seemed the right thing, period, talking to him right after he had held his daughter for the first time. This was love, too: so open and generous and alive. There are so many ways to love. How is it we have only one word for it? I might not have been his great love, if there was such a thing. That was okay. The demand for reciprocity was bizarre, insane. And impossible.