Scorpionfish, стр. 22
My brother knew none of this, and I probably won’t ever tell him. It upsets me, talking of these things. One can only move forward, or try.
Despite his worry about our father, he was in good spirits. I asked him if he’d visit this summer and he grew quiet, said he didn’t have the time, but he’d try to come soon. I knew he would not. While his first wife, the boys’ mother, had fallen so in love with the place and the language, his second wife was less enthusiastic. Seeing Greece through her eyes has given my brother a renewed disdain for it. Their first and only visit was a disaster. She ordered iced tea at dinner, and when the tavernas did not have it she took it as a personal affront. She viewed everything in Athens as though it might be contaminated, was afraid to drink the water, to eat any fruit, to ride the train. She wiped down every surface with little wet cloths she kept in her purse. I wanted to tell him that now she could order any sort of iced tea, that there were organic juice bars and teahouses and vegan restaurants, but I knew that would not be enough.
“Go to the island, see if he’s okay,” my brother said. This surprised me. He had always exhibited such contempt for our father, but I suppose it was an inverse sort of guilt disguised as resentment. Me, I was the opposite, masking resentment with guilt.
I told him I was going soon for a christening, and we hung up.
Whereas my brother has always been on the offensive with our father, I am forever on the defense. What surprised me most was the disgust my father had expressed, when I was younger, regarding my decision to stay at sea. You’re escaping, you’re running away, and this to him was unacceptable. Get a job closer to home. Get a job on land. Our relationship had always been difficult—as a teenager I’d confronted him about his infidelities—so to see him take on the persona of a virtuous family man filled me with a mix of sadness and rage.
But the thing is, he did see himself as a family man, one who never abandoned his wife and children. Not for the love of another woman, not for a sense of independence. In this way he saw himself as loyal, as sacrificing other lives for the one he’d first chosen. To him it was the way of the world, the world of men, and he maintained both a fierce no one will tell me what to do attitude along with a deep sense of obligation.
Despite our differences, we share a nostalgia for the future—a dangerous, optimistic longing for what could be. It’s what kept him in politics and what has kept me afloat.
6
Mira
Those first weeks I was in Athens, Nefeli, working hard for her opening, sometimes behaved the way she had that night out with Fady and Dimitra—unagitated, full of warmth. Other times, she acted strangely, as she had that day at the beach, speaking in non sequiturs or circles. Irascible. From time to time she was uncharacteristically quiet. Sometimes she stayed up all night in her studio, but it wasn’t until after her show opened that I really began to worry.
But until the opening, when she wanted a break from working, I’d meet her at the new coffee shop several blocks from her studio, the one with the goat logo. I was calmed by the minimalist space, even its unapologetic trendiness, and when I walked in with Nefeli the baristas’ faces lit up. I’d never seen her studio, which was in an old building that she and a few other artists used as a workspace. It was too private, she said, like offering a glimpse into the mechanisms of her mind. Only Fady had been there, but she made him promise not to utter a word about the project. Her reticence was born less of self-importance than it was of superstition.
But that morning, Nefeli had asked me to meet her at her studio. She had a few things she wanted to bring and needed help carrying them. I’d woken late, so I hurriedly dressed and stopped at my corner bakery for a coffee to drink on the way. It was one of my true Americanisms, walking through the city with a drink, which drove Nefeli crazy. I loved Athens in the morning: the way the early light hits the streets, the scent of butter and sugar from the bakeries, the crowded coffee shops with the lively chatter and the smell of smoke.
Nefeli’s studio was not far from the small experimental theater on Mavromichali, past the old movie house, past her favorite taverna, and fairly close to her apartment. Most of the homes were old beauties, some bright and well-kept and others in various stages of disrepair. One seemed like it had been burned in a fire, and the next was fit for a magazine photo shoot. Nefeli’s building, though, was a large, three-story, gray corner structure I had walked by many times, noticing it mostly for the interesting street art that covered the walls: black-and-white Soviet-style drawings. On another wall was some stenciling: DEAR CAPITALISM, IT’S NOT YOU, IT’S ME. JUST KIDDING, IT’S YOU. IT’S OVER. The front door was huge, industrial, like you’d find at a loading dock, and I rang the bell twice. I wandered around the corner to see if there was another entrance; on the side of the building someone had spray-painted, in Greek: NO HOPE. And below that, in English: FUCK MY DESIRE.
From the open window on the top floor I could hear