After wandering awhile, I climbed those steps again and reached Dexameni Square. Though it was too early in the season for the open-air cinema, the open-air café was packed: kids played on bicycles and pogo sticks, adults of all ages sat in large groups and small, drinking cocktails, eating mezedes. A couple my father’s age—late seventies—sat on the same side of a table, glasses of white wine before them, holding hands and looking out, as if it were all theirs. The man wore a dark suit with a red cravat, and the woman’s dark hair was perfectly styled, her dress navy blue with white piping, a trench coat draped over her shoulders. Their tranquil looks unsettled me, and I decided against sitting alone. Instead I kept walking until I reached one of my standby bars in Plateia Mavili, where I knew both the bartenders—a heavily tattooed bearded guy and a serious-faced young woman, whose ponytail swished back and forth as she worked. I drank a tall draft and headed home.
The walk back to my apartment was like strolling through a tiny village after a wrong turn, or something near the beach on a less-traveled island. Take any parallel street and you’d pass immaculate residences with well-manicured gardens, yoga studios and law offices and trendy cafés. But on this route, a few chickens still hopped around, an old trailer was parked in the middle of a lot, and a fenced-in area held a mini junkyard: a few old cars, metal pipes, old furniture. There was only one actual house, and I loved it. It stood bright and cheery behind a rickety, makeshift fence, as if the concrete of the city had been built up around it, or as if I’d walked into a fairy tale. It looked recently restored: a warm, creamy yellow coat of paint, red tile roof, and a garden of bougainvillea and oleander and lemon trees. Next to it was an old shed, which had at one time needed a new coat of paint. Now, it had been painted with flowers and citrus trees, a mirror of its setting.
At home on my balcony, I smoked a cigarette. The courtyard was eerily quiet, and the night, with only a shaving of the moon, was dark. Only the sounds of the occasional motorbike, maybe a car radio. I slept a long, blank sleep until sunrise.
•
The next night Mira propped her feet on the balustrade, wearing sheepskin slippers. If the light was right you could see the shadow of a person behind the cloudy glass partition, and if we both leaned over the balustrade we could have had a conversation face-to-face. But we did not.
I had learned a bit about Mira from Sophia: she was from Chicago. A professor of some kind. Sophia wasn’t sure. Her parents had recently died. Nefeli was her aunt. I thought of what I might say, if only in greeting. Then, the flick of a lighter, the inhale of a cigarette, the exhale of smoke. My words tumbled out before I could think. “I didn’t know you smoked,” I said. I had not only broken some unspoken code of communal living, I had implied a history. But if she found it odd she did not miss a beat.
“On and off. But I officially quit years ago, after college.”
“I try to quit,” I said, though I had stopped trying a few years ago. The couple who lived on the other side of the courtyard arrived home and began cooking, as they always did. Below them, someone made a video call in French, which happened every other night at eight. The neighborhood took on a new life in the evenings.
I asked if all was okay with the apartment, the heater.
She didn’t speak at first, but her feet shifted. “I somehow lost the key to the building,” she finally said.
There are three things you need to know about Greek apartment buildings, I told her. First, there’s strong disagreement about whether to lock the front door, with the key, from the inside. So you also need a key to get out, after midnight. She said that sounded dangerous. I told her I’d be right back and I returned with my extra key, handing it across the balcony, and we met eyes for a moment, smiled. She thanked me and told me she’d make a copy. In the darkness her eyes seemed luminous and gray, as if in black-and-white film, and it took me a moment to focus on the rest of her, the contours of her body underneath a loose, dark sweater, a thin gold bracelet around her wrist and several woven from thread. Her dark hair was messy, wavy around her face.
It suddenly felt strange to be looking at her, so I retreated, sat back down in my chair. “Also, there’s a fight over the elevator. The people on the first floor don’t want to pay for it. The people on the second floor claim they don’t use it. Finally, the question of how to heat the building, the most fraught of all.”
She laughed. “Good to know.” Her phone rang and she excused herself for a moment. “Hi, Dimitra,” I heard her say as she disappeared inside. She returned moments later, telling me about a boy who was living with her friends Dimitra and Fady and their daughter, Leila. She mentioned a refugee squat nearby, in an old abandoned school, and asked me if I knew of it.
I told her I did not.
A silence hung in the space between us. I see now she must have misinterpreted my reticence, maybe took me to be a nationalist, xenophobic fascist. “You reminded me of something, of the time when I was still working, and the reasons now I’m not.” My opportunity had come, and I could tell from the quiet that she was waiting for me to continue. But my words felt blocked.
“I understand,” she said, finally. Though how could she. I excused myself and said goodnight.
•
The next morning, I picked up Katerina and the kids at the airport. The twins piled into the back seat as if I’d come for them after only a few days’ absence, talking and planning for the birthday party that weekend. Katerina recounted the busy few weeks she’d had, something related to an upcoming funding deadline. As we turned onto our street, one of the more modest of the neighborhood, everything seemed larger and more open than I remembered. The trees seemed greener, the air crisper.
Between the car and the front door, Katerina and the twins were stopped by an eager neighbor. I steered around them, set the suitcases down, and took out my keys. When I opened the front door my chest tightened. The year had rewound—before I lost my job, before living full-time in the Athens apartment—but instead of feeling familiarity, I felt as though I’d stepped into another reality, another version of my life. As Rimbaud famously wrote: I is someone else.
The kids raced to their rooms to charge their devices, back to the house they knew as theirs. Katerina walked in, set the groceries we’d stopped for on the counter. I began to unpack them, as was our custom, and she asked if I was still planning to accompany them to the island over the summer, when she’d take a couple of weeks off. She reminded me that as far as the kids knew, we were only separated because of work. I think Katerina and I often told ourselves the same untruth. There’s a comfort in those things that remain unexpressed.
I reassured her that I planned to come to the island, and Katerina disappeared into the bedroom to take a nap. Ifigenia came out as I was finishing up with the groceries and sat on one of the barstools in the kitchen, playing some internet game I did not understand, complaining about her brother. She wanted sympathy and some lemonade. With their mother, they helped themselves, but when I was around they asked me for things. Can I have some milk will you make me some cereal can you order souvlaki.
There was a new refrigerator, sleek and chrome and tall, and I stood in front of it as though it were a portal. The old refrigerator had been fine. Not particularly old, even, just basic. There was also a new espresso machine, the kind that used not coffee but little pods, which didn’t seem to me like coffee at all. All that pod-waste, drifting in the sea.