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.
“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
