Scorpionfish, стр. 40

I asked her once, after a discussion with my friends—all of us with immigrant parents, or immigrants ourselves, Ukrainian and Lebanese and Indian and Korean—if we were white. She answered without hesitation. “No,” she said, as if I were an idiot. “We’re Greek.” She was begging the question, but I dropped it.

“I could spend the rest of my life trying to understand her,” I told the Captain.

“Have you ever written about her?” he asked.

I told him I’d only written about people who’d explicitly given me permission. People I came to know under the pretext of writing about them. As I said it I felt a little uneasy.

He was quiet for a moment. “So you don’t really come to know them. Only who they’re showing themselves to be.”

I put my head down in my hands, suddenly dizzy, light-headed. I could no longer be a cipher for other people’s stories—not in the academic context. It was too difficult to not acknowledge how I changed the space. Even listening is not passive, but it’s not as though I’d show up and listen. I spent weeks, months, years, even, building relationships. When I finished the oral histories, the most interesting things were the things I remembered, those things that had passed between us: a glance of knowing between the two of us, the long process of establishing friendship and trust, the moments spent laughing and crying. A hand held, a political fight, an inappropriate crush, a surprising loss. Those were the things I wanted to write. I did not mention my own parents, who also lived through the junta, who married when it was over, had me, and, five years later, left Greece for good.

I am certainly not the first to have had this feeling, but it has begun to weigh on me. My dissertation involved collecting oral histories from the junta, and my first book the stories of women specifically, from prison camp survivors to sympathizers of the regime. I am happy I wrote it. But compiling all these stories, arranging them, editing them—it was more art than scholarship. It’s why I was so thrilled when Svetlana Alexievich won the Nobel for Literature, an acknowledgment that imagination was as much a part of what we did as what a novelist does, an acknowledgment of living with all those voices, a human ear, she called herself, carrying them with her.

The cicadas were loud but the neighborhood felt still, hot, like we were the only two people moving, in action. “Isn’t that how we come to know anyone,” I finally said. The wall between our balconies, which had allowed a kind of intimacy, at that moment felt cruel. I wanted him to put his hand on my shoulder, I wanted to see his eyes.

“Could be,” he said.

“I wouldn’t know where to start, writing about my mother.”

“Haven’t you already. Started.”

“I guess. Yeah.” I wished him goodnight, but instead of going to sleep, I went out, wandered through Exarcheia a while, feeling broken, tender to the entire city, as if she—all of her—were talking to me.

•

Since Nefeli’s show had opened, she had stopped putting herself together. If I phoned while she was sleeping she became irritable. If I didn’t phone she was more irritable still. She’d work and work and then disappear to the island, cut off communication, as if she needed to re-grow or reconstitute herself.

She wasn’t eating properly and seemed to have a dry, incessant cough. Yet she talked about returning to yoga, or taking up running. These things she uttered with such conviction that I think she truly believed she might. The city, the protests, the bleak situation for the refugees, all things she cared about deeply—it was all becoming too much. The crisis was disappearing from the global panic stage but not in Greece itself, she said. How is this going to define us all, she wanted to know.

The crisis imaginary, she called it.

One afternoon, Dimitra and Fady and I went to visit her. When we arrived, she didn’t look well but rushed us out of the flat. We asked if she’d eaten and she lied and said yes. But that day, she seemed eager to go out. Dimitra suggested a nearby old, traditional taverna Nefeli loved—my father had loved it too, and as a toddler I had often come here with my parents, my small stroller parked outside. In fact, there’s a picture of me standing on a chair in a green dress on my third birthday, a paper crown on my head, my parents behind me, laughing. Nefeli had been a regular there since before I was born, the first public place she’d eaten when she returned from her island exile, barely nineteen. Maybe afterward I’d get her to lie down.

“No,” she said. “It’s a winter place.” I knew it was something more. Instead she suggested a vegetarian restaurant in Syntagma, run by a young Greek woman and her Afghan husband—friendly, relaxed, impossibly thin, glowy yoga people who always spoke in generous, warm tones. It was a great place indeed, but far, and the metro was on strike and it was too hot to walk, and Nefeli refused, for whatever reason, to move through the city in a taxi. We went instead to a small Cretan place down the block.

Outside, a bag of trash had spilled onto the sidewalk. Nefeli swore, kicked a carton of juice down the street, and her foot became entangled with a plastic bag. A young man passing by us gave her a dirty look, his lip in a sneer.

I motioned for Fady and Dimitra to sit. He grabbed a table and Nefeli, without resistance, followed. She put her head down in her hands. “Nothing is changing,” she said. Her voice was muffled, desperate. Fady glanced at me, quickly, and my gut tightened. He pointed toward the board, set up on the sidewalk: LOCALLY SOURCED. LOCAL DRINKS. VEGETARIAN.

“I mean. Seriously,” he said.

I downed my draft before the first plates of food came—dakos