•
The Captain, I was surprised to learn, had just returned from N., the island where my mother had inherited our place when I was ten, and where we’d return to when we came to Greece for the summer. My father always left after three weeks, but I’d stay through August with my mother, who, like me, was on an academic schedule. I had always felt bad for him, having to go back to work, but now I realize he enjoyed being in Chicago alone, temporarily freed from my mother’s sadness.
“The Captain’s father lives there,” Sophia said, meaning the island. “You have a lot in common,” she added.
She took me by the arm and led me outside, gesturing to the cigarette in her hand. We continued our conversation on the sidewalk while she smoked, and soon the Captain came around the corner, holding the newspaper and looking down at the ground.
Sophia looked my way as she blew a stream of smoke away from us, then nodded toward the Captain. “There he is.”
•
I spent the rest of the evening drinking beer and rustling through the closets, which reached up to the high ceilings. There was far more here than I’d realized. I played old Greek records loudly on the old Victrola. I found a box of my baby clothes, as well as three more of Nefeli’s paintings, lined up like books on a shelf. I hadn’t seen these paintings before, figures of the same long-faced women but with their bodies erotically intertwined. In a little tin I found a bunch of orphaned keys. I threw some things away: a box of old rags; chipped mugs and dishes; some soft linens that smelled a little of mold; the baby clothes.
Excavating these remnants of the past, I felt neither nostalgia nor a particular connection. I felt newly empty. But when I tried to pinpoint the source of this haunting emptiness it was not clear. Grief had become a part of me, like another layer of skin. But I think, now, I was grieving both the things that had happened and the things that would come.
One of the last boxes I opened held a collection of dolls dressed in intricate, traditional Greek costume. When I was a child these dolls had sat on my dresser, and at night I thought I saw their arms moving, their legs ready to march. They frightened me. Once I had taken several of them on a boat ride with my parents’ friends. My parents, for all their love of the sea, were uneasy on boats, and my mother had been preoccupied with my falling overboard until she became too nauseated to worry. When no one was looking, I reached into my backpack and removed the dolls, which I’d fitted with parachutes made of my father’s embroidered handkerchiefs noosed around their necks. One by one, I began to hurl them into the water. I must have thrown four of them out before my father noticed what I was doing and stopped me. After, the two of us watched them bobbing in the water, his embroidered handkerchiefs floating atop them, or spread out behind their heads. Still, these dolls seemed to be a common gift, continuing to accumulate over the years. There were at least a dozen of them lying haphazardly in the box. I returned them to the closet. It was too hard to discard something with a face.
2
The Captain
My mother was Greek American, and though that might mean my mother tongue is English, I was born in Athens and feel and dream in Greek idiom. But I’m not a man of geography. I don’t attach myself to places. I’m more comfortable with the placeless universality of the sea, its altered progression of time.
Even though it’s been years, I miss those long passages across the Pacific: the contained isolation, the morning rising up from the water like the opening of a shade, the creeping dread at the first sliver of land, like coming down from a high. How different the world looked from a point at sea. The sight of a harbor no longer stirs the same emptiness, but the sea no longer gives me that same unbridled joy. Everything seems dampened, my emotions less extreme, settling somewhere deep and less accessible. The true marker of middle age.
Katerina, my wife, has been working for the EU in Brussels since September, and the twins, because of my schedule at sea, have gone with her. At least, that was the reason we gave them for the arrangement. Nikos and Ifigenia, nine, don’t know I’m no longer working. Katerina and I are separated, but we struggle with exactly what that means. We do not not enjoy each other’s presence. There were times when we were younger that I raced home to see her, when the separations felt unbearable. Sometimes she’d even wait at the port. For me, these past years, it was not so difficult to be apart, but I imagine for her it sometimes was.
Not long after the move to Brussels last fall, Katerina’s sister lost her job and had moved with her daughter into our home in Kifissia. We’d temporarily offered them the place. I was happy to live in the center of Athens anyway, in the apartment I’ve been in and out of my entire adult life. I’ve never liked the suburbs. And being in Kifissia—each time I say it, I hear my father’s scorn, so bourgeois—felt as distant as being shipwrecked. We could have lived in Piraeus, or Glyfada, or Neo Faliro: somewhere near the port. But Katerina wanted to be near the kids’ school.
So even after Katerina’s sister moved out, having found work in Thessaloniki, I decided to stay in the Athens apartment. But now Katerina and the kids were coming home for the weekend—she’d promised the twins they wouldn’t miss their best friend’s birthday party—and I needed to be there, in the old house in Kifissia, as I was each time they returned.
Despite not being attached to places, I’ve grown fond of this Athens apartment. But those days there, waiting for Katerina and the kids to arrive, put me in a bizarre sort of limbo. I couldn’t focus on any one task. I wandered the rooms, stood on the back balcony that looked out over the courtyard or the one in front, over the street, which curved up toward Lykavittos. The restlessness was overwhelming. The worst days for me, around transitions, are the days before. The waiting.
Walking eased that anguish a little, allowed me to move my body along with my racing mind. I walked through neighborhoods I’d rarely visited, into Kaisariani, its own village, really, with a history dating back to the Asia Minor refugees. I strolled the wide pedestrian walkway that wound around the Acropolis, watched the puppeteers and musicians, older tourists holding hands, American college students in tiny clothing. I walked through Psyrri, where the vibrancy of the crowded, lively cafés seemed to beat inside me along with my heart.
As for this apartment, it was the longest I’d spent here in years, and besides the sad-eyed woman whom I’d glimpsed in and out while the apartment was being renovated—a woman I later understood to be Mira’s mother—I’d been alone on this floor. Even before Katerina and I had agreed to separate, I spent a night here every few months, those nights I had time off between routes but didn’t want to sleep on the ship, didn’t want to go all the way back home. To come home for a day sometimes seemed too disorienting for Katerina and the kids. Or so I told myself. Katerina and I both knew that it was simply disorienting for me.
One evening, I walked through the heart of Neapoli, where large concrete apartment blocks built during the junta transitioned to old neoclassical homes—some bright and well-kept, some in disrepair, many decorated with graffiti—and down the countless steps of Isavron, through Exarcheia, to Kallidromiou, where the breeze felt cool and airy. Here it was lively, the night pleasant, and under heat lamps people leaned in to intimate conversations, evening coffees, and drinks. I wore sweatpants and an old hooded sweatshirt, my indoor self turned outward, only my keys and phone and twenty euros zipped into my pocket.