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.
And he was hard on me. A 97 percent had him asking for the other three points, and when he was angry at me he could give me the silent treatment to end all silent treatments. But he was also, as they say, a hazobabas. He spoiled me.
Fady was asking something I didn’t hear. He was a good man, warm and reliable and generous, and Dimitra and Fady’s relationship always impressed me. They balanced one another; Dimitra always cool yet wildly spontaneous, and Fady more warm and open but with a measured accuracy to his behavior. Despite the years together, two decades, it was fresh, energetic, not bogged down by suburban lethargy or middle-age malaise. Leila became a part of their life, integrated in, as opposed to her becoming what their life revolved around. Make no mistake, though: Fady was besotted with his little girl, and now with Rami too, the three of them shooting baskets in the evenings in the park around the corner, or going to the Saturday market together to decide what to cook. They were fluid in that way, always open for something new.
Though I saw it as the ideal, I couldn’t bring myself to attempt it; I’m more comfortable as a guest outside the family unit than as a member of it. Or maybe I craved a more capacious definition of family. Fady said my name again.
Next to us, a table of drunk and beautiful young actors from the National Theater sang along with Dimitra’s version of “Trele Tsigane,” one of my favorites. Nefeli sat up in her chair, alert, and she touched Fady’s hand.
Then I turned to the
