Scorpionfish, стр. 34

The waiter brought a small bowl of olives, some fried feta with sesame seeds and honey. “Our treat,” he told us.

Dimitra smiled, thanked him, though she seemed distracted. Her jaw tensed. I thought it had to do with our discussion of Rami, whose impermanence deeply troubled her. Or maybe she wanted to tell me something else about Aris, though what else was there to tell. But I was wrong. “We have to talk about Nefeli,” she said.

The other day, she and Nefeli had gone out to get some wine while Fady finished dinner, and she’d seen Nefeli slip a bottle opener into her pocket. A few days later, the two were shopping for Leila’s birthday. This time it was pajamas from a shop in Syntagma, an American chain. Nefeli had wrapped a pair of pajama pants around her arm and pulled down her sleeve. When Dimitra relayed this to Fady, he told Dimitra that he’d gone to Nefeli’s apartment a few weeks earlier and the place had looked like a department store. He glimpsed a room full of clothing laid out on a bed. Her bathroom was filled with toilet paper and shampoo. Packages of T-shirts on the dining table. Makeup, pens. When he asked her what it was she was nonchalant, said it was for something she was working on, and walked him out.

Dimitra was now sure the flannel shirts Nefeli had given Leila for her birthday, the T-shirts for Rami, had all been stolen. She stopped eating, looked down at her food, rubbed her temples. “I don’t know where to begin,” she said.

I remembered that Nefeli had come by the squat with a bag of things recently—socks and flip-flops, notebooks and nail polish—that the girls went nuts for. Rami let one of the little girls paint his nails blue.

Dimitra sighed. “I did tell her we needed those things.”

“Maybe she’s just hoarding,” I said. But we all knew that was unlikely. Nefeli hated to spend money. I wasn’t sure if she was truly feeling destitute or if her theft was some sort of political act.

“I’m not sure what we’re supposed to do,” Dimitra said, popping an olive into her mouth.

Added to the litany of issues we were dealing with that year—strikes, neo-Nazis, the various facets of the vague, all-encompassing “crisis”—Nefeli’s petty shoplifting seemed low on the list. But something about this news unsettled me, as it had clearly unsettled Dimitra. I thought of Nefeli’s strange outbursts the day we’d gone to the beach, her recent combativeness each time we’d met for coffee. I knew when she was planning a show she’d often go through manic phases, and once she’d finished, she’d slip into a depression until the artistic well began to fill again. A familiar pattern to be sure.

Fady showed up as we were leaving, and the three of us walked. We stopped at a square, lively in the evening, with children running around and adults on benches, having drinks in the cafés, walking with friends. “The sounds in the plateia,” he said, “the shouts of mothers, the squeals of children, the music of the voices. I’ve been recording them everywhere. You go to Berlin, to Paris, to Dublin, to New York: the voices don’t sound this way. But in Gaza, in Cairo, in Aleppo: from afar, I would not be able to tell the difference. Sofia, Thessaloniki, Istanbul: these cities are Balkan. But Athens belongs to the Levant.”

As always, I marveled at the changing light: it is orange, it is gold, it is lavender, it is dusk. Just before the sun disappeared, we stopped in a shop selling leather backpacks, like tourists, then a bouzouki/lute shop whose owner Fady knew, and an eclectic used bookstore with lots of foreign books. We walked through a dark residential area: the neighborhood had been working class, but recently artists and young people and their fancy European strollers had moved in, and in the distance we heard music, saw lights. Another thing I loved about Athens: the way you could move through it on foot, from neighborhood to neighborhood, the night unfolding as you walked.

On the corner was a bar that seemed to glow red, rose, violet. The bar was crowded with people vying to order a drink, but we sat at a tiny table in the corner of the back room, looking out at the bar, the street. To our right was a large window, open into the night. Dimitra and I had Campari and soda, and Fady ordered some variation of a Negroni. Our ice cubes were shaped in the letters of the Greek alphabet.

An eclectic place, self-aware: a small vintage refrigerator was mounted above our heads, an old red bicycle, a transistor radio. Two Italian men next to us—clearly so by their body language—charmed two Greek Australian women. They spoke in English, broken but alive.

Fady eyed them with both envy and marvel. “Here, they’ll also always be expats,” he said. “If you’re from Afghanistan, Iraq—even Bulgaria, Albania. It doesn’t matter: foreign national at best. Migrant. Refugee. Sans-papiers.”

I wasn’t sure if he was talking about himself, or Rami.

“You don’t know how easy you have it,” he said. “The options.”

I didn’t know what to say. His voice was not blistering, nor was he wrong. “You didn’t come here as a refugee,” I said.

“Not here, no. But I was, as a child. You’re aware of the fragility of everything, always. That at any moment it might all implode.”

“And in Germany, for Rami?”

He was quiet, as if I hadn’t spoken, and deep in thought. “But I am a refugee,” he said finally. “I’m not ashamed of it. Why should I be? I’m also a violin maker. And an artist. And a father. Husband. Exile. Many things.”

Dimitra put her hand on his. He shrugged. “Maybe in Germany it will be different,” he said.

I worried. In Germany it might be worse.