PART ONE
1
Mira
The small two-bedroom flat where I lived until I was five is on the northern slope of Mount Lykavittos, between the neighborhoods of Ambelokipi and Neapoli. Back in Athens for the first time since my parents’ funeral a few months earlier, my arrival felt both unreal and more real than anything I might have imagined, as though my porous, jet-lagged self had emptied itself into this space.
Aris was working in Brussels for the week, and though I still could have gone straight to his place, I didn’t. Though I’d planned to live with him, I had to spend some time cleaning out my parents’ flat before I’d rent it out. When I’d come for the funeral I couldn’t bring myself to go near it. I expected Aris to object to all this, but instead he’d only asked, “You sure you want to be alone there?” I told him I’d be fine, but really, I wasn’t sure.
In fact, it had been so long since I’d been to this apartment that when the cabdriver hoisted my bags out of the trunk, he must have noticed my disorientation because he asked, “Is this the right place?” I told him yes, but hesitantly. Then I recognized the flat on the ground floor, which, as when I was a child, had its shutters open to the street. You could have jumped right in from the sidewalk.
I held my jumble of keys like a lantern. It was growing dark, and for whatever reason—crisis, negligence—all the streetlights were out. The key to the apartment itself, a big, old-style safety key, was obvious, but I couldn’t seem to locate the one for the building door. The others were for Aris’s place, the house on the island, and who knows where else.
A light went on inside, and a tall man, perhaps in his early fifties, wearing headphones and running clothes, came down the staircase. He opened the door for me. I thanked him, acting as if my hands were simply full. Noticing, he helped me haul my suitcases up the first few stairs from the foyer to the elevator on the first floor. Even now, I remember the soapy smell of the rhododendrons by the mailboxes, the hint of his grapefruit cologne.
I followed him, then stopped at the foot of the marble stairs. He, whom I’d later know as the Captain, placed my bags in the elevator and asked me which floor. I told him the third, and a look of surprise crossed his face. “Oh,” he said. “We’re neighbors.”
How had he seen me upon this initial meeting? How had I seen him? I struggle to remember how many of these details I had truly noticed or have simply inserted now. We must have spoken in Greek, though later we’d use English as well. Did I hear the thin music from his headphones? I recall something I had until now forgotten: in that first interaction, I felt a flash of recognition, of some silent acknowledgment, a feeling of both surprise and inevitability.
I thanked him, and when he left I sent the suitcases up—the elevator too small for both me and the bags—and took the stairs. Everything looked smaller than I remembered, but walking up those strange yet familiar flights engaged some sort of homing instinct. As if my arms were moved by some force outside myself, I turned the clunky safety key in the lock and pushed open the door.
Forgetting that my mother had begun remodeling before she died, and that it had looked different even before then, I had expected the apartment of my youth. There was still the airy living room, those high ceilings, the honey-colored parquet floors. A new coat of paint—a soft beige accented with white crown molding. Sheer curtains over the glass doors to the balconies, new shutters. Once closed in and rather dark, the kitchen had been redone in a more contemporary style, as a pass-through with stools and a serving bar, opening up to the dining room. The cabinets were new, white and shiny, and there were new butcher-block countertops. The refrigerator was also new, but affixed to it were a few magnets from takeout souvlaki places, touristy ones from all over the country that my mother, rather inexplicably, had collected.
I remembered more paintings and photographs on the walls, but now only two things remained: a framed print of the entire Divine Comedy—all one hundred cantos printed in tiny, barely legible font—and a large painting of Nefeli’s. The piece, one from a series of variations on an old church near the sea, had once hung in our dining room in Chicago and now hung here, over the dining room table. The last time my parents came to Greece, they’d brought it back with them. The large door of the church was open, and in the doorway stood a woman with a dark mane of hair, her back to the viewer. Almost unnoticeable, blending into the darkness. From afar it looked like a dark painting of a church and nothing more. Sometimes I imagined the girl moving; at one point I had convinced myself that she appeared only to me.
Despite my annual visits, I hadn’t been back to the apartment since my father’s older sister, Haroula, was alive and living there; over the past seven years I’d always stayed with Aris. After Haroula passed, my parents rented the place; they primarily came during the summers and preferred to stay on N., the island where my mother was born. But last summer, perhaps in anticipation of spending her golden years moving between N. and Athens, my mother began to renovate, as if making these improvements would convince my father to return them to Greece. To her, assimilation was equivalent to death.
I called Aris in Brussels to let him know I’d gotten in safely. He apologized again for not being there. He asked about the apartment, and I told him about the new kitchen, the fresh paint on the walls, the simple furniture. He seemed relieved.
As we were hanging up, he blurted, “Hang in there,” which I might have taken as strange, had I not still been mourning my parents. His familiar voice soothed me, though it felt thick with a sadness I attributed, at the time, to the wrong thing.
Few reminders of my parents remained. There was the record player, a smaller version of the one in Chicago, and several end tables. But below the bathroom sink I found a collection of mostly empty liquor bottles—my mother’s cashed-out arsenal. I picked one up, unscrewed the metal cap, smelled the thin trace of vodka. I turned around quickly, feeling as though she were watching me. My mother, always the subtext.
I moved through my old apartment as though I could walk through walls, my past and present and future selves all negotiating the same space, bumping shoulders, tripping over feet.
The closets were nearly empty, except for a few storage bins. I was surprised to find papers and notes from when I had been a graduate student in ethnography, taking oral histories, talking to the inhabitants of the island who lived through the Nazi occupation, through the dictatorship. It’s how I met first Aris’s father—the novelist—then Aris himself. That first meeting with Aris, and what came after—that is the love story most would want to hear.
•
My next exchange with the Captain happened the following day.
Jet lag had kept me in bed most of the morning, and I felt oddly cold. I could not figure out how to turn on the heat. The thermostat seemed purely decorative. A large monstrosity sat in the corner of the living room, some sort of space heater, but I didn’t know how to use it. The relentless chill of a winter in Athens was nothing like Chicago, of course. I’d expect it in January. But this was early May.
When I finally made it out of bed, I slid open the door of the balcony and stepped out into the late-morning sun. The apartment was on the third floor, but because the building was built into the side of the hill, the courtyard plunged down five or six stories. From here I could peer down into the treetops—a pretty space filled with lemon trees, bitter oleander, and mousmoulia, the loquat-like fruits that most reminded me of my grandparents’ home in Halandri. The space was spotlessly maintained by the elderly couple who occupied the bottom two floors of the building. The man was sweeping the courtyard, and I could hear his wife talking from somewhere inside. I recognized the cadence of her voice and realized that they had been living there for nearly forty years, if not more. Since I’d been a child. From another apartment I heard a quiet, measured conversation, and from another building the shouts of children playing and the steady pound of a hammer. But street traffic was nearly imperceptible, and it was surprisingly quiet—the rustle of leaves, the chirping of birds.