Scorpionfish, стр. 26

was leaving. We’d finished American Born Chinese and The Encyclopedia of Early Earth and were beginning Ms. Marvel and Anya’s Ghost. I’d ordered a slew of graphic novels online. I’d arrange them in front of him and he’d choose the next. He mentioned his brother in Germany often, whom he talked to on video chat; his family was growing anxious, frustrated at the slowness of the system, the failure of the reunification procedures. But he never directly mentioned leaving. Besides, the system all seemed so chaotic, so disordered, that nothing really seemed to matter. He’d left his home, alone, in the middle of a war. He’d made it here; he probably wasn’t worrying too much about the legalities. But he seemed torn. “I love my brother,” he said. “I miss him. But.”

“But?” I asked.

He shrugged.

One afternoon after my class at the squat I waited for Rami, who was late, which was unlike him. I could feel my pulse quicken as I looked around inside. I asked Nadine, who ran the classes for the smaller kids. No one had seen him. Dimitra didn’t answer when I called, so I tried Fady.

He picked up and immediately apologized. “Sorry, lost track of time.” Rami was with him. “Come by the workshop.”

When I arrived, I heard Cretan lute music playing loudly and found the two of them, each seated on one of the ergonomic work stools. Fady was showing Rami how to use a leveler. “What’s this?” I asked. Rami, in turn, demonstrated for me the way to use the tool, explaining what they were working on with an almost rehearsed bravura.

“He’s a natural.” Fady grinned, and Rami shyly shrugged.

This was of course better than idly roaming the city, or sitting in the crammed classroom at the squat with kids of all ages. Fady gave him attention, he spoke to him in Arabic and English and Greek, and he was learning something. “I wasn’t much older when I started apprenticing,” he said.

“I didn’t say anything.”

Later, though, I understood Fady had brought him to the workshop not simply to keep an eye on him but to create yet another connection, that Fady hoped Rami’s interest in instrument-making would somehow further tether him to their lives.

“I cleared this table,” Fady said, his tone shifting now to business. “I have to leave for an hour or two, a shift at the asylum office. You can work here.”

Whereas Leila would pout with any sudden change of plans, Rami was spontaneous, quick with transitions. From his small backpack he pulled out a Staedtler eraser, a few graphite pencils. He opened his sketch pad and, with some prodding from Fady, showed me several of his sketches of the workshop: propped against a beige futon were two cellos in various stages—one brand new, not yet strung, and one in need of bridge repair.

I told him they were very good, and he smiled. But he became distracted by his phone, sending messages to his brother in Berlin. He looked up at me suddenly, as if he’d read something on his phone he wanted to tell me, and asked when I’d go back to the States. I told him I didn’t know. This seemed to surprise him—it surprised me too, saying it out loud, since I had always left by the middle of August. When my parents had been alive I’d felt a heavy, unspoken obligation to live close to them: no more than a two-hour plane ride away. I had always been the parent, had always played the role they should have played with me. Perhaps it’s why I’d never had the urge to have children. Not really, anyway.

Whereas the return to the States always felt like a natural, bittersweet part of my life, the cycle of the school year and the summer, the thought of going back to the States now felt flat-out depressing. It had never been easy, my departure signaling not only a return to the States and a goodbye to Aris and all my friends here, but also a return to the grind of classes, the endless e-mails, the university politics, an academic life obsessed with who worked the most, where productivity was not a quality but a virtue, and a passive-aggressive bullying that seemed to define my department’s primary means of communication—a life I myself had worked so hard to obtain. The six years in graduate school, a postdoc, and finally a tenure-track job that always seemed like a dream, something that happened to other people. All the while my connection to Greece on a parallel and sometimes intersecting track: my dissertation-turned-book had been about women’s experiences of the junta. Somehow, having Aris remain here in Athens, and the solid connection of my parents, comforted me. Now, the thought of being away from Greece felt unbearable, unfathomable, as if it could all slip away from me, and my life in the States felt as though it belonged to someone else. I watched Rami paging through his sketchbook. What would it be like, to not go back at all? To stay here, in Athens, or at least in Europe? There were universities, institutes, think tanks. Maybe I could find something.

More than ever, I felt deeply connected to the grit and beauty of Athens, coupled with the ghostly world of my memory and imagination. Say what you will about it—this country’s structure of feeling was not one of isolation. America was a very lonely place.

Rami showed me a series of drawings, thumbnails. Most were of his neighborhood in Damascus, the first he’d mentioned it. Fady and Dimitra’s large flat was much like his flat in Damascus, he said, the orange trees on the street, the smells, the balcony that wound around the entire building. I asked if he missed it, and he shrugged, said yes, he missed his friends, his classes and teachers, the particular place he liked to go after school for a snack. “It’s part of your novel?” I asked.

“Maybe,” he said, and smiled. I was worried