Scorpionfish, стр. 30

“I forgot about this rooftop,” I said now to the Captain. In the sunlight his hair was not nearly black like mine or Aris’s, but light enough that Greeks might call him blond. His eyes, without his glasses in this sunlight, the color of camouflage: brown and green and gray.

“To be honest I’d never thought to look,” he said.

“Sorry again to have asked,” he said of my cheek.

“It’s okay,” I said.

My father busts through the door, onto the roof. He is livid. Though prone to his own rages, he was a gentle man and had, to my knowledge, never hurt my mother. He rarely spanked me, and when he did he cried afterward. My mother and I are facing Lykavittos but we turn our faces back to him. My face looks suddenly stricken, as though I have just realized he is upset, but my mother has her head swung back, her hair spilling down her back, that golden-yellow dress with the embroidery on the sleeves. My father reaches out to take me from her and leaves my mother there on the roof, dancing.

A parapet was now built around the rooftop’s perimeter, which I did not remember. I remember feeling worried she might fall off. How much does she drink a day.

I walked to the chairs but then passed them, to the ledge. The Captain didn’t sit either. Nor did he talk. “I have a lot of memories here,” I said. I turned to face him again.

My mother is on that roof with us, in that yellow dress: drunk, and singing. Another song we used to dance to: I’ll get myself a captain. She’s laughing, throwing her head back, and then she turns to me again and mouths: “He’s married too, koukla.” She turns away and clinks the ice in her drink. Almost empty.

The Captain smelled of fresh sweat, of salt, of the tangy barb of his deodorant. He walked to the edge of the roof, peered over the parapet. He stood like a soccer player at ease: hand on cocked hip. Together we looked up to Lykavittos and down at the city, coming alive under the early-morning sun. The Wednesday laiki was in full swing already, and the shouts of the vendors—cherries, apricots, lettuce—rose up in the air.

He knew I was interested in the histories of these Athens neighborhoods. He told me that when he was a child and would visit his uncle, who lived in the flat he occupies now, the neighborhood was much different. He pointed to the narrow road that ascended the hill and widened as it rose to Lykavittos: one neighbor had goats, he told me. And chickens who began their koukourikou before daybreak.

Very few apartment blocks lined this street then, he continued. “Before you were born, of course,” he added. In fact, if you walked just a block or two down, he said, on the way to Mavili, it was like walking through a tiny village. “I can show you later, if you like,” he said.

Sure, that would be nice, I thought I said. But I guess I didn’t.

“Maybe you want to be alone up here?”

“No,” I said, letting out a weak laugh. Alone? “Not alone. Thank you. I’m done.” I turned to face the door but we were indeed now alone.

He pulled the door open, grinding it against the cement floor. I walked down the stairs ahead of him again, aware of him close behind me, aware of his eyes on my back. My shoulder blades tingled. At our doorways we greeted each other goodbye.

“You sure you’re okay?” he asked.

I nodded. “Didn’t sleep much last night.”

•

Let me return now to that memory of my parents. Right before we moved, nearly thirty-five years ago. So I am five and my father finds my mother and me on the roof and whisks me away, leaving her there with her small green tumbler of something or other. My mother comes back into the kitchen fifteen minutes later, where I’m drawing at the table, a dismissive look on her face. I feel as though I’ve done something wrong, and I cry all evening. My father’s silence penetrates the house. “She needs to be more careful,” is all he says to me.

This is how I see it still. Like a film.

Or maybe it’s that the truest, most defining moments were captured only in my mind, never film, never digital image. Now we capture everything, walk around with a self-awareness so acute that it becomes a lack of one. Look at me look at me look at me don’t look at me.

You capture so much that nothing of your self will be left.

•

They say that children who are exposed to a language as babies always retain that language. That their brains will respond differently to it than non-native speakers, even if they are not able to understand or speak it as adults. I think of Leila and her ease with three languages, four, even, if you count the French she studies at school. But for her, Arabic and Greek will be forever imprinted, the way I suppose Greek is imprinted for me.

Maybe it’s the same for places. I remembered very little about this apartment, and I wonder if what I do remember has come from pictures, or if what I remember has come from memories, but there are a few stark, vivid images that remain lodged in my mind. When I had shut the door behind me that morning, despite the earlier unpleasant memory, holding my coffee that had grown cold, I felt oddly impervious.

A few days after that incident on the roof—not with the Captain but the childhood incident with my parents—my grandmother scrubbed the hell out of the kitchen with Ajax. My parents were busy packing. I was in the courtyard with my grandfather, and I don’t know why—maybe I had to use the bathroom or wanted something to eat—but we were coming back inside. Whatever the reason, I remember it was