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.
The Captain and I shared adjoining back balconies that overlooked the courtyard, separated by a wall of opaque thick glass, an architectural veil behind which I heard him now moving from one side of the balcony to the other. I could not see him but felt his presence. He sighed deeply, and for a moment I thought he was going to speak. But it was my voice that first bridged the gap.
“I’m sorry to bother you,” I said, in my most polite Greek. “But can you tell me how to turn on the heat?”
“There is no heat.” The building had voted to not pay for heat this winter, he explained. The costs were too high. “But this cold is very rare for this time of year,” he added reassuringly, noting it would warm up again in the next few days.
He could tell by my silence I did not find this comforting. “I have a few space heaters,” he added. “If you’d like them.”
“There’s one in my living room,” I said. “But I’m afraid of it.”
He laughed, then apologized, offering to come have a look.
Moments later, the Captain hesitated at the threshold, glancing around, focusing on my table: coffee gone cold, a half-finished beer, a bar of chocolate, my books and pens and papers and laptop. My two suitcases, one of them thrown open in the middle of the dining room. He was taller than I remembered. I realized I looked a little ridiculous, my hair covered in a navy beanie, wearing my father’s too-large fisherman’s sweater that I had found in a drawer.
His eyes were drawn to Nefeli’s early painting above the table. “She lived here, years ago,” he said. “A friend of my father’s. A well-known artist.”
I did not reveal my connection to Nefeli then. I can’t say why. Though much of it I would later discover he already knew. How my father and Haroula, Nefeli’s lover, were siblings. How Haroula had hid her sexuality from my grandparents, despite the years that she and Nefeli had lived here, in this apartment together, a fact I suspect they’d nonetheless known and simply refused to accept. Though I admit a hazy understanding of Greek inheritance laws, I do recall that children should inherit property equally. Some divide it up among themselves, assume ownership for this or that. Haroula died with nothing to
