Scorpionfish, стр. 33

9

Mira

I wasn’t planning on visiting Fady and Dimitra that evening—while in the States, sometimes weeks would pass without my seeing friends—but after Fady learned the story of what had happened at the pharmacy the day before, he said, “Either you come here or we come there.”

When I arrived, I allowed him to delicately remove the bandage from my cheek so he could inspect the stitches, but Dimitra demanded we do so discreetly in the entryway; she didn’t want to upset the kids. Fady tipped my cheek up to the pale hall light, grudgingly praising the work. “There will be no scar,” he said.

“Ha,” I said. I hadn’t told them I’d seen Aris again. But when Fady returned from the bathroom with a new bandage and a bit of antibiotic ointment, Dimitra had to reapply it because his hands were shaking. He told us he had a commission he needed to finish and disappeared to his workshop.

In the kitchen, Rami was doing Leila’s math problems and Leila was, according to her, making slime. Some sort of internet thing, Rami told me, giving me his usual shy half hug. The two of them sat together, across from one another at the table. Leila had straightened her hair and it hung like a glossy curtain down her back, and with her caramel-colored eyes she looked disconcertingly like a young Nefeli. Rami concentrated the same way I used to, head cradled in hand, deep in thought. I used to fall asleep that way.

Rami paged through his old book, showing me drawings I hadn’t yet seen, about a young boy in school in Damascus. Toward the back of the sketchbook he’d drawn some stark, pastoral landscapes, nearly dystopic, nary a human in sight. But I found it harder to engage him than normal, for whatever reason. Usually we had an easy rapport.

Something in the apartment felt strange, something that went beyond what had happened to me the previous day, something I sensed Fady and Dimitra were withholding. Finally, as if staying in the house would force her to address whatever it was I was feeling, Dimitra slipped her arm in mine and suggested we go out. She forced a smile. Fady was working, the children content.

We walked to a place on Strefi Hill—almost impossible to get a table for dinner but at that time of day, there were free places. It reminded me of Thanassis’s taverna on the island: the multicolored pastel chairs, the stillness, the metal pitcher and small tumblers of water between us. The waiter, a bearded ponytail guy, a lovable anarchist, liked us, and the times I’d come in with Rami they’d spoken a mix of English and Greek. They talked about soccer, and I was surprised at the way Rami already had such strong opinions on the Greek teams and beyond. Our waiter was an Olympiacos fan, and Rami AEK, and when Rami made a joke about “gavros”—the little fish—I didn’t even understand he was belittling the waiter’s team, but the waiter laughed.

Dimitra and I ordered some baked chickpeas and some bread and split a small carafe of white wine. She asked me if I wanted to talk about Aris and I told her I didn’t. We talked instead about Rami: his love for Leila and hers for him; the way Fady felt as though he had a son; the way Dimitra was overcome with the will to protect him, to raise him here in Athens, knowing of course his family waited more than two thousand kilometers away. “It would take twenty-four hours to drive there,” she said. “I checked.”

She told me he was curious that I had left Greece as a child and had now returned, and she wasn’t sure if he understood—“No, he understands, I mean, accepts”—that the country he had loved and left would never be the same.

Dimitra reached over the table to touch my cheek. Discussions of politics, even in the home, made Rami nervous, she said, and she and Fady had begun to censor what they talked about, and when. He walked around with worry beads, like an old man, and told Dimitra he was a nihilist. “He knows what a nihilist is?” I asked. She shrugged and laughed. She showed me some pictures from the weekend. They’d gone to her parents’ home, in Oropos. Leila and Rami were barefoot but in sweaters, facing the calm sea, the large island of Evia.

Rami’s hands were both on his head, elbows out, and Leila’s head, ever so slightly, was turned to him. In another photo, Rami was holding something in his hand and Leila was bent over to look, and in another they stretched their arms over their heads in a yoga sun salutation, performing for the camera.

It was the first time since Rami’s arrival that he’d been in the sea, but Dimitra said he was okay, running through the sand and collecting tiny crabs. Then he and Leila sat at the large table on the balcony for hours, drawing while the adults talked. She said they were working on something together. Rami was an easygoing kid, usually difficult to rattle, and we wondered what experiences remained at the forefront of his imagination and what things he had buried deep. I asked if Rami had said anything else about what had happened the other day outside the pharmacy. Her brow furrowed, she tied her pretty curls back at the nape of her neck. We both knew Rami had seen far worse. The year anniversary of Rami’s arrival would come in August, and Dimitra worried it would cause some resurgence of trauma, painful memories. We were all trying to keep those at bay, knowing of course that our attempts were in vain. Try as you might, you could not