Scorpionfish, стр. 23
“No peeking,” she said, deliberately leaving the door open a crack so I could. She was in good spirits. The ceilings were high, and the space was huge. Behind her was a large table, scattered on it dozens of little blue scorpions, ceramic, with distorted limbs. I found them disconcerting. She slipped behind another dividing wall, which was where she was building the components of the installation, and emerged in a clean shirt, holding overflowing tote bags. She handed me one filled with school supplies and another with flip-flops in various sizes and colors.
The squat, as Nefeli and Fady and Dimitra referred to it, as well as those living there, was not far from the studio. It was an abandoned school turned into housing for recent arrivals, a cooperation between the refugees themselves, mostly from Afghanistan, Syria, and Iraq, and local anarchists and activists, depending on whom you asked. Nefeli was proud of the work being done there, and she wanted to show it to me. She thought it would be useful for my new project—one I admittedly had not yet started—on grassroots organizing from the eighties until now.
From the outside of the school, the tall cement walls, the steps going up, you’d imagine it to be filled with the voices of schoolchildren, which it was. Nefeli led me into the courtyard, where we were met by Nadine, an animated young woman dressed in various shades of mauve and plum, perfect eyebrows. That summer everyone’s eyebrows seemed full and alive.
She clapped her hands together and smiled when she saw the bags of notebooks, the packets of blue Bic pens, the colored pencils, the markers for a dry-erase board. Nefeli quickly introduced us and took some of the materials and disappeared behind a door off the courtyard, where she ran a drawing class for teenagers and adults. In another room off the courtyard a meeting was in progress: men and women discussing, in English, the labor rights of immigrants and refugees, and a man stood in front of the room, interpreting. Later that night, Nadine said, the room would be used for a dance class. Through the window of another room I could see children from the ages of eight to twelve settling in to the desks: these were children who, most of them recent arrivals, had not yet been enrolled in Greek schools. The first lesson of the day, according to Nadine, would start soon: math. One girl sat on a bench, reading, while another behind her braided her hair. A third sat at the desk, vigorously erasing something in her notebook.
Nearby, some women sat on a blanket, holding toddlers. One younger woman painted the nails of another, and on a nearby bench an older woman read a novel, holding it at arm’s length.
From across the courtyard a lanky older boy approached us. He held an infant no more than a year old, dressed in a pressed white oxford shirt, little blue shorts, and light-blue socks, his eyelashes like giant fans. In this new context it took me a moment to register that the older boy was Rami. He smiled, a big toothy grin, recognizing me from the other night. Because he was not in school, Dimitra had arranged various homeschool options for him. During his off-hours he came here with Fady or Dimitra, helping with this and that: acting as a babysitter, even a translator for the younger kids, or disappearing into the corridors with the older boys, which made Fady nervous, but Dimitra insisted he’d be fine. Rami’s spoken English was already excellent, and next week we’d start writing lessons together, per Dimitra’s request.
The men at the squat were virtually absent, but the older boys, some nearly young men themselves, hung out in the back of the courtyard, away from the women and the children, and though Rami looked young for his age, at least to me, I could tell now that he was more one of them than he was of the kids who sprawled across blankets, drawing pictures and making crafts, writing with bright-colored chalk, waiting for their morning lessons to begin. Perhaps these kids were used to strangers dropping in as volunteers, and they eyed me shyly.
Rami watched, too, holding the baby facing out. He kicked his chubby legs and looked around the courtyard agreeably, as if taking in any new place, as if he’d just been dressed up one morning on his way to a family wedding and, by some glitch in time and space, ended up here. Which was about right. “Do you want him?” Rami asked, now extending him in front of me.
The little boy laughed when I took him in my arms, looking back toward Rami with a calm, taciturn expression. Rami put his hand on his hip, proud of himself. “He likes to see out,” Rami explained.
“You’re a natural,” I told him, shifting the boy around. Rami said a few words to him in Arabic and he smiled, and then I began to whisper a little Greek rhyme in his ear and he remained transfixed. “I’m going to join my friends now,” Rami politely said, “but maybe I’ll see you soon?” I nodded and he disappeared with the others, all of them too old for that first class, I guessed.
The little boy stayed on my hip, happily looking around, but suddenly I felt ridiculous. What, exactly, was I doing there? Whose child was this? When I’d gone to places