“Nefeli’s not with you?” Dimitra asked, going back to the door, which was still open, peering into the stairwell as if she were about to tell me a secret. I, too, wanted to tell her about that strange afternoon at the sea, but the doorbell rang and they buzzed her up. When Nefeli reached the landing and smiled, looking refreshed and rested, I relaxed.
The traffic and commotion of our arrival summoned Leila. It had been two years since I’d seen her, and I almost did not recognize the teenager before me: her dark, shiny hair piled messily high atop her head, black leggings, black T-shirt, black-rimmed glasses like Fady’s, black Ugg boots. When she was younger, she would come flying around the corner and throw herself onto me for a hug, her arms wrapped around my waist. She’d lost her youthful gregariousness and now shared Dimitra’s unnerving demeanor, which on a near-child was almost disarming.
But I insisted on a hug and she stepped toward my open arms. Pulling her toward me, I spotted a younger boy—though at this age it was hard to tell—standing in the space she’d just occupied, and I knew this must be Rami. Rami had arrived last fall, alone, from Damascus; his father and Fady had been childhood friends, and he’d managed to make it to Athens and reach Dimitra and Fady there. He should have been in a Greek school by now, but some snafu with paperwork, with the bureaucratic maze, had delayed his enrollment. Dimitra had told me he wanted to be a writer and had asked, over the phone, if I’d consider tutoring him. I’d happily agreed. Rami had relatives in Germany, an uncle and aunt and cousins whom he missed dearly, and an older brother too, who’d taken it upon himself to leave first. When they’d left, Rami’s parents had still been alive. As I understood it, unaccompanied minors were able to apply for reunification with family elsewhere. Yet ushering this long and arduous process along was another story, and it seemed the rules were always changing. And so he waited. I knew Dimitra and Fady loved him deeply, said they’d be happy to have him stay forever, but it was complicated: Rami’s aunt—his father’s cousin—and Rami’s brother were already waiting for him in Berlin.
In the meantime, Rami had spent two months at the American school with Leila; the teacher was a friend of Dimitra’s and had looked the other way. But when some of the parents found out he wasn’t officially registered they threw a fit.
So aggressively denying one child, can you imagine?
I released Leila, and as she withdrew from my embrace she caught my gaze.
“My cousin,” Leila said warmly, gesturing toward the boy, though I knew not actually. Rami smiled shyly and nodded, then he and Leila scampered back into the den to continue their game, children again. Fady called after them in Arabic, and Dimitra in Greek, and Leila called back, “I know I know,” in English.
This had been the linguistic landscape of my childhood neighborhood in Chicago: those first- or second-generation trilingual households of likely and unlikely combinations, children toggling between languages without hesitation. But Leila would be one of those international, cosmopolitan kids I’d known in college, global citizens more than anything else. I had not been this way; I had been only an immigrant, there was nothing cosmopolitan about my experience, and if there had been it was by mistake.
Dimitra mentioned that a friend of hers, an acquaintance of mine, had seen me in the cheese shop in my neighborhood. He wasn’t sure if it was me so he didn’t say hello, but this rattled me. For some reason I had been moving through Athens with the sense that I was invisible, that somehow, without Aris, without my parents, I had lost the definition of my physical self. That I was somehow deconstructing and recomposing myself all at once.
I never imagined I’d allow a man, or any relationship, to define me, yet I’d allowed it to happen anyway. I’d told this to Fady once, and he had shrugged and said, “But why not? What’s wrong with being defined by love?”
As the dinner neared its conclusion, we decided to skip the dessert, some tiny cheesecakes Nefeli had brought from the sweet shop, and head to the nearby bar where Dimitra would sing. Table cleared, we gathered coats and shoes to leave. I watched Fady pull on a quilted down jacket, as if we were in Chicago. “What?” he said, laughing. We walked out, my parea dressed for snow and I for the beach. Yet when I wrapped my cardigan close around me, Nefeli caught me: “You see?” she said, laughing, and pulled an extra scarf for me from her bag like a magician.
Dimitra was the singer but it was Nefeli who began belting out Kazantzidis as we strolled outside, before we’d even reached the bar. “Life has two doors,” she sang, and this—along with the abundant wine we’d already drunk, despite the pain of the song—put us all in one of those open moods, a heightened emotional state. Rami and Leila, who’d disappeared as soon as they’d finished eating, peered down from the balcony and watched with amusement, as if we adults were a spectacle of entertainment. Nefeli stretched her arms out and moved in a circle, and Leila and Rami, with smirking irony, began to clap for her from above. But me, I felt so full of raw emotion and pain and sadness I could have burst. Later, when Nefeli was gone, I tried to remember her at that moment. Watching her sing this song as if her life depended on it, I could have ripped my heart from my chest and flung it to the ground as if it were a plate.
•
The bar was small and cozy, the walls painted orange and red, the bar and its stools a deep golden yellow. Small black tables and chairs, with an eclectic mix of glasses and plates, as if everyone in the bar had raided their yiayia’s china cabinets to assemble the tableware. The wall that faced the street was made of windows, drawn open onto the outdoor patio that was dotted with heat lamps. We sat inside, closest to the windows and the musicians. Dimitra’s speaking voice was rather low, but her singing voice had an impressive range: clear and feminine and sonorous, with a striking degree of pain. A female Kazantzidis, Fady always said. He, like Kazantzidis, considered Western music rootless. Jazz? Dimitra would ask him. Blues? He remained unconvinced. “You make violins, Fady,” she’d say. But it was Dimitra who was the purist, and Fady’d fallen in love with Greek music—all of it, Kazantzidis especially, with his focus on xenitia and exile, loss—when he fell in love with Dimitra at university years ago.
A strange comparison, maybe, but you’d understand the moment Dimitra parted her lips. A clear, intense depth, like water you could look deep into and see your feet, the urchins below, the small details on the fish swimming by.
I watched the bouzouki player, only half our age but playing like my father had, his cigarette held between his pinkie and ring finger, and I could feel the hot familiar swell of anxiety in my chest. Dimitra had little patience for anything even relatively new. She and my father were similar that way. But beyond his aversions and his predilections—Greek coffee, early-morning walks, elegant wool sweaters, old rebetika—I had hardly known the man at all. I know he had had deep pain, that the pain of exile for him was so intense that he suppressed it entirely. It was why Greek music made him so emotional, made him weep.
But I don’t mean to sentimentalize him. We are harder on mothers than on fathers, who simply need to show up once in a while, cook us an egg. My father used to call me when I was in college, early, always on the landline—how strange now, a landline, though I had one here in this apartment—to see if I was awake and sleeping at home. He timed it just right: too early for me to already be out for class, but late enough to make sure I was not sleeping in. Seven thirty a.m., on his way to work. It didn’t matter if I was out until two studying, or at a party, or when I had worked at a bar and didn’t return home until three or four in the morning. He believed in what he called “normal” hours, and anything else was a sign of weakness, laziness, or defeat.