Scorpionfish, стр. 41
“If you take a photo of this,” Dimitra said, waving her hand over the table, “I swear I will get up and leave.” I don’t think I have ever posted a photo of a meal, but I said nothing. Nefeli, however, laughed, and we were all grateful for this. Fady rolled a cigarette and said if they made the sidewalk seating nonsmoking he’d riot. He rarely smoked. Nefeli stood to say hello to a friend inside, then disappeared to the bathroom, stalking past a table of young people who stopped to watch her back disappear through the door. She was upsetting even the anarchists.
I waited for Fady to say something about the hipsterfication of this neighborhood, about crisis tourism, but he was quiet.
But he watched me closely, as if I might reveal something new. Did he think I knew something about Nefeli? Did he think I was drinking too much? Were we all watching one another this closely?
Meanwhile, Dimitra watched Nefeli, who was inside, talking with the bartender. The more distant a person, the less they knew about her, the more she lit up. When Nefeli returned to our table, Fady gently joked with her, and though she was usually quick-witted and acerbic, she didn’t say much.
We paid our tab and Fady left for the workshop to meet a client. He sounded exhausted. He was worried about Rami’s newfound moodiness, and Nefeli’s unsettledness had us all in a constant state of unease. Dimitra headed to the squat, and Nefeli and I walked together. She asked if she could come to my place, sit on the balcony a moment. It was too hot for the balcony, where my laundry hung and dried within minutes, but I agreed. Even without air conditioning, my apartment’s relative cool darkness felt nice. I turned on the ceiling fan, remembering how cold I’d been when I’d first arrived.
For a while, she stared, like a cat, through the pass-through into the living room. Finally, she lay down on the couch and fell asleep. I felt calm with her there, as though I was somehow protecting her. So much of my life Nefeli had looked out for me.
When I heard a thud, something falling to the ground, I checked in on her, but it was just her phone, having slipped from her pocket. I’d since hung some other paintings I’d found in the closet, her others from this series—the church on the island—and she napped underneath dark colors, each with shocks of Aegean blue. It was on a visit when I was fifteen that I made the connection between these images and Nefeli, a connection even now difficult to retain. Other paintings, those of the women, I kept in the closet, worried somehow that they’d upset her. But this is not why it’s difficult for me to integrate these paintings of the young artist Nefeli with the woman who came to check on me when I arrived, the woman I drink beer with at Mavili. When you know somebody so well, it’s hard to also recognize their public selves. I see Aris’s name now in the paper, the rising star of his party, and I read it with both detached fascination and a knot in my gut. Even I, the person who writes the oral histories, who publishes the essays, is not the same self who now writes these words. She is barely here at all.
Nefeli’s show, her insistence on both a retrospective and new work, was part of her desire to define time as anything that was not now: yesterday, tomorrow, last year. Her anger that day was a sort of premonition, a glimpse into a future we didn’t want to see. Or a future we could see but had no power to alter.
In the early evening Nefeli woke and I made some tea—she drank it with milk and honey, which is how I now drank it, even in summer—and when I returned to the table with the tray she was staring at the painting, as if she had not noticed it before. I waited for her to say something but she didn’t. We drank our tea and she suggested a walk.
We headed down along Lykavittos, and Nefeli was quiet until we reached the entrance of the park. “I forgot you had those others,” she said. “The paintings.”
I hoped it didn’t rekindle bad feelings: about Haroula, other loves, a past that was never really past. She was indeed in another conversation. “There are so many ways to be unfaithful,” she continued. “There are so many ways to betray someone.”
We walked through the park, where the keening of the cicadas was almost deafening; they were trapped in their own nightmare. She stopped walking, to listen. “They’re dying,” she said. “That’s why they sing.” She kissed me on both cheeks. “I’m going home now,” she said, and when she disappeared around the corner I had a sickening feeling I would not see her again.
In some way, I was right.
Back in my apartment I detected the faint smell of rose water, like my mother used to wear. I couldn’t look at Nefeli’s paintings. I sat in the living room and tried to read, but found myself turning pages without having taken in a word.
Nearby, someone’s rock band had begun to practice, their piercing guitars filling the courtyard with a Metallica song I remembered from my childhood, which soon transitioned to a heavy metal version of “Evdokia’s Zeibekiko,” which I also remember from my childhood. My mother had wanted to name me Evdokia, after the movie, and my father was incensed because the character was a prostitute. Since the film, no one could have that name without association, he said, though I thought it was a great name, meaning “she whose deeds are good.” Instead, they named me Myrto, and often called me the diminutive, Myroula. When we