We went anyway, Fady and Dimitra and I. A crowd of young people had already gathered, wanting to clean it up, to restore it. The long line of megaphones that lined the walkway headed to the museum, that circled the entrance, had been kicked in, holes punched through, covered with graffiti. The cameras, interestingly, had not been disturbed, though it had happened in the middle of the night and they were not on.
Dimitra told them to wait, to see what Nefeli wanted. They all stopped what they were doing and looked at us as if we were all crazy. I’m sure when we’d turn away they’d shoot photos of themselves there, their smooth-skinned faces lighting up each other’s screens. One woman—dyed black hair, heavy boots, velvet leggings despite the heat, the rest of her slight, sweet looking—asked if she was sure, said that Nefeli was allowing herself to be silenced.
“Let it be, please,” Dimitra said.
“But what about expression,” another asked.
“Expression,” Dimitra said, the register of her voice shifting, as if Nefeli were speaking through her. “Whose expression?” As if the first time hearing the words, trying them out on her tongue. “Is that what you think art is for?”
•
Nefeli sold five new paintings, just like that. The vandalism had given her new street cred. Oddly enough, all this had temporarily invigorated her, given her work another element, another chapter. But none of us saw her. She responded to texts, but sporadically. Yet she was aware of the attention. She did a radio interview, and one of the arts-and-culture magazines wrote a feature on her, but she refused to appear in public. Fady spliced some of her interview comments into the soundscape. Her voice, disembodied this way, was eerier than I could ever have imagined:
Art is not about expression. Art is about porousness.
And the one that killed me: Art is a conversation with the dead.
I went with some friends to the taverna, the one with the chandelier that had hung in Tito’s home, beneath the painting by the Serbian artist Nefeli had known. The owner recognized me and asked if I’d seen her. I wished I had better news.
Her disappearance made me feel as though I were fading too. Midafternoons I’d open a beer and fall asleep again until evening. I missed the Captain. I missed being invisible yet seen, the feeling of being so alive in my body yet not of the body at all. What a relief it was sometimes to be not-looked-at, to feel my edges sharpen again, less worn down by the gaze. I closed the shutters, with the urgent desire to disappear.
I wasn’t getting any work done. And as for university business, I’d open my e-mail and see a note from a colleague wanting to form some ad hoc committee, or from students needing something. “Hey Mira,” the notes began, if they addressed me at all. Though they referred, often in the same note, to my male colleagues as “Professsor.” I’d close the e-mail, my arms too heavy to type a response. I knew I was lucky to have this good position. I knew I should not take it for granted. It was as if my academic life in the States no longer existed or mattered. Yet I had the constant feeling I was forgetting something.
I’d sometimes wake late from a nap, make more coffee, and begin to write. Or attempt to. Then I’d be wired, so I’d have another drink. Some days the birdsong would be in the courtyard, the morning light graying the sky, by the time I’d be able to fall asleep. This repeated for several days, which blurred together.
But then one day Dimitra called at 12:30. I’d missed my class at the school, my tutoring with Rami. I apologized, told her I could make it there in an hour. She said not to bother.
She called again an hour later to ask, “Should I be concerned?”
“About?” I asked.
“This is the second class you missed this week.”
The second? I pulled out my phone to check the calendar.
“Is everything all right, Mira?”
“It’s nothing,” I said. “Just a few bad days.”
How much. How much does she drink.
I showed up the following afternoon to make up for the missed classes. Dimitra was also there, with Rami, who wouldn’t look me in the eye, but I could see him scanning my face when I looked away. Suddenly he’d become a teenager, shooting up several inches, his voice dropping an octave. “I’m sorry,” I said. I wanted to make excuses—work, exhaustion, grief—but I knew what such apologies sounded like.
My mother called out to me from the cement bench inside the school’s courtyard, where she smoked a cigarette and read the leftist paper. “You see what it feels like? Now you know.”
I sat on a bench and scrolled through my phone. On a whim, I opened a message to the Captain. I’d entered his phone number after he scrawled it on the corner of a yellow legal pad on my small desk, from that day I’d asked him about the heater. I’d never used it, of course. When I wanted to talk I opened the door to the balcony. I typed and typed, deleted and deleted, saying nothing, what to say, but something was compelling me to connect. Hi. Hello. Ti kaneis. Ti yinetai. Are you sleeping. I gave up. The instinct to tell him something was so visceral yet we had never really established this sort of communication. Besides those few occasions—the island, the roof—our chats were sequestered to the balcony and for
