But I was too late. The night had swallowed her up.
The next night, I asked the Captain about the screams. Though he slept with his balcony doors open, he said he had not heard a thing. The ship made him a light sleeper, he added. Always ready for an emergency.
“You really heard nothing?” I asked.
“Not even the cats,” he said.
I wasn’t sure where the screams were coming from. Lykavittos? Near the stadium? Sometimes what sounded like music from a party in the next building was coming from the park that was a fifteen-minute walk away. But I know these are excuses that I make because of the helpless shame of lying in my bed, my shoulders pinned down by fear.
“Are you okay?” he asked, finally. “Mira?”
I realized sleep had taken hold in the chair and I’d been dreaming of driving around with large green-and-turquoise sea charts I could not read, trying to place one into my eye like a giant contact lens. I told him this.
He laughed, a deep, gentle laugh. “You remind me that I haven’t paid attention to my dreams. I’m probably having them but my sleep has felt blank.”
“That sounds wonderful. I’m often teaching in my dreams, about to lecture on a subject I know nothing about.”
He was quiet. I wasn’t used to talking to someone who didn’t interrupt each sentence. I continued. “Except suddenly I’m bartending, my boss complaining about the wrong drink, words spilling out of her glass, across the television screens while I fumble with a tiny lock on luggage, or try to dial a phone number.”
“Me, driving a car into the water and sinking; or worse, watching my kids drown and not being able to help them. Of water, of blindness, of rock.”
I was quiet, trying to imagine his kids. Twins.
“I’ve never told that to anyone,” he said.
“Terrifying.” The woman and her scream came back to me. But it had not been a dream. “So hard to explain.” I paused. “‘A dream cannot exist in words.’”
“Is that—”
“From Maria Nephele,” I said.
“Elytis.” He seemed disappointed. Elytis bored him, he said. The sun, the sea, we get it. He spoke a bit more but I felt drowsy, suddenly sleepy.
Later, I woke draped with a white blanket that was not mine and a vague image of him handing the blanket to me, a quick glimpse of his face. I rose from my chair, went inside, and flopped down onto my bed, feeling an odd rush of euphoria.
4
Mira
The next evening I went to Fady and Dimitra’s for dinner. When I arrived at their place, Fady shouted down the staircase excitedly as he heard me walking up, and when I appeared on the landing he threw his hands into the air. He was wearing an apron printed with blue fish, holding a wooden spoon.
“Cute outfit,” I said, and he and Dimitra pulled me in close for kisses and a hug.
“I never liked him anyway,” Fady whispered. I laughed, knowing that of course he had liked Aris; they were friends, but there was a tenderness in the comment. Dimitra never quite trusted him, didn’t find him believable—another neoliberal in a leather jacket pretending to be a progressive—and I didn’t feel like arguing about something I had lost faith in myself. What Aris wanted, Dimitra posited, was for people he didn’t know to adore him. Nefeli, on the other hand, had simply tolerated him, having known him since he was a petulant child. Aris and Nefeli had always approached each other with a slightly proprietary arrogance, and I long ago had given up trying to have them be friends.
I handed Dimitra a bottle of wine, some flowers. She set them down and took both of my hands, looking into my eyes a long time, as if trying to say something. She had big honey-colored curls and a contrasting cool demeanor; she loved wine and was able to turn anything into a brainy conversation. When they welcomed me in, I made my way around the boxes that jam-packed the foyer. Dimitra told me they were Arabic-language books for the refugee camps and the various squats in Athens.
If my parents were my connection to a nostalgic Athens, and Aris to an ideal one, then Nefeli and Fady and Dimitra were my connection to the present moment, a guide to a reality of this city that, as the American journalist Kevin Andrews had written decades earlier, was both the most intense and the least visible. I had known them all for years. Though Fady was a violin maker by craft, he also worked as an interpreter, with his connections to both speakers of Arabic and Dari. Fady had lived in Athens since he was in his twenties. His small workshop, which he used to live and work in, is at Plateia Mavili. If we wanted, Dimitra often joked, we could throw Molotov cocktails from his workshop balcony to the US embassy.
When I spoke to Dimitra earlier, she had told me Fady was out, taking a Syrian family to the asylum office, and about the absurd system they’d had to navigate to get the appointment. She told me about unaccompanied minors, refugee kids selling themselves in the park. A father with toddlers, his wife who had made it with their infant girl to Germany. Two separate boats, one stopped by authorities, one let go. The blurring lines: the volunteer agencies doing more than the NGOs, the journalists becoming volunteers, the refugees themselves organizing better than any government agency—at least the ones in Athens, not those isolated in festering, overcrowded camps on the peripheries.
While everyone else in Athens was struggling financially, Fady and Dimitra squeaked by. They’d been better off years before, of course, but they were still afloat. By Greek standards, anyway. Fady’s hypothesis: if people had money, they were investing in expensive things like instruments, and a lot of his business came from the better-off countries of Europe. They lived in a bizarrely large flat for an even more bizarrely low rent on the border of Neapoli and Exarcheia, about a ten-minute walk from my place. Dimitra also owned a small but gleaming apartment in the center that she rented on Airbnb for three times the price of their own. A necessary evil, she said, knowing the way it drove rents up. The taxes on it, in addition, were terrible.
Fady hated idleness: he was either building a cello or restringing a violin or working as a freelance interpreter. He was incredibly skilled at video editing and had worked with friends on a documentary; he was friends with the Balinese graffiti artist and the Greek Argentinian singer and the aging, slightly deranged leftist composer. He knew everyone. His hobby of sound art was becoming a second career. He and Nefeli were working together on her new installation, part of her upcoming show, though I didn’t yet know its details. My point: you would never call Fady and find him binge-watching a television series or sucked into social media. Dimitra was a freelance journalist and a gorgeous singer. When up for it, she sang in a few little bars across the city.
People often came to Dimitra and Fady when going through a tough time—just last month they’d had two friends, journalists from Ankara who no longer felt safe there, staying in the guest bedroom. They helped them settle in Athens, and when Dimitra told me the story, introduced us, I recalled the way she and Fady, and a tiny Leila, had taken me to the new IKEA to make sure I had a proper desk, a comfortable living space, in that small flat I’d rented in Pangrati as a grad student. Leila still had the stuffed giraffe I’d bought for her then, flopped over her dresser. Days later, when I had attempted to build the desk, filled with white-hot rage as I stared at a diagram instructing me to get onto a diving board, Dimitra came over and we put it together within an hour. Being with them always calmed me down.