The softer my voice, the more infuriated Nefeli’s became. “They have no idea what that means. To be silenced. They talk so much they have no idea what they mean.”
Nefeli seemed to be waiting for me to leave, which I did. I stepped outside, if only because I had no idea what to do with my body. I heard the gurgle of her water pipe, smelled the sweet smoke through the open window.
I found the novelist coming down the hill, his legs a bit bowlegged; I realized he walked just like Aris. I’m surprised I hadn’t noticed it before.
“I’ve never seen her this agitated,” I said, quietly. We moved away from the door.
“She refuses to talk to me,” he said. “Yet she wants to stay in the house. Aliki brings her food and juice, says she’s often in conversation with someone not in the room. This morning Aliki helped her wash her hair, but Nefeli refused help drying it. It’s as if she doesn’t even hear me.”
He told me she was staying up all night, drawing or painting. “I suspect she’s in unimaginable pain,” he said. Often during the days she disappeared to her cottage. Nikos drove her. She was too frail to take those narrow, uneven stone stairs herself, and he drove his pickup truck all the way to the door.
Then, suddenly, the front door of the novelist’s house flung open. There stood Nefeli, framed by the arch. She was still in her pajamas, plus a drover hat and leather jacket.
I felt as though I had been discovered with a lover by a jealous spouse. Her expression was pure disgust, but there was something frightened, dejected in her face.
I’d betrayed her, somehow. By going along with the façade that we both knew I was going along with? I had thought that was the way she wanted it, despite my discomfort. I now think she wanted me to challenge her, all this time, to force myself to face it. She had been broken by Haroula, a woman who could never quite acknowledge their love, could never be as public as Nefeli would have liked. What is a relationship in secret? She wanted to know. It’s not real. It’s nothing more than a dream.
I don’t know if I agreed, but I had spent a lot of time thinking of it.
Had she thought we—I and the novelist and the Captain and Fady and Dimitra—were not talking about her? That I was performing obliviousness not only for Nefeli but also for the novelist and everyone else I encountered? That in our dealings I had also convinced myself she was fine?
“I don’t want you to write about any of this,” she said. “Nothing. Not my art, not my love affairs. Definitely not my politics.” Then she waved her hand over her body, as if to say, Especially not this.
“And you,” she said. “Even when I vanish.”
“Please don’t vanish,” I said.
“We deal with all of it and shield the men from its effects. Let them deal with the shit they create. You stupid girl. It’s all shit.”
She was rambling, she was all over the place, as if time wound around her in spirals, saying one thing and then unraveling it the next moment. “Both of you: write this down. Why aren’t you writing this down? Your little books, your little stories.”
“Your oral histories,” she said to me. “Your little projects. Bah.”
“And you. Your stupid novels,” she said to him. “I dare you. Write it.”
She turned back inside and we followed. She asked for some hot water and lemon. “I’m detoxifying my body,” she said with a cackle. But when I brought it to her in her room, she became exasperated.
The novelist asked me to stay the night, and I knew it was because he thought Nefeli might need me. We sat on his balcony, which was narrow and long and overlooked the valley. From there the world felt nearly still, nearly calm, nearly sane. Nefeli slept, and though she was at the other end of the house we kept our voices low. I asked him about the scorpions, which Nefeli’s new paintings seemed obsessed with. Her new drawings had the faces of haggard women on the bodies of scorpions, or thin young women with grasping claws for hands, and segmented tails. It was gruesome looking, the most gruesome I’d seen her work be.
He told me the only other place in the world he could imagine himself living—that he’d visited, at least—was Cuba. Maybe Spain. Landscapewise, culture, he said.
He often talked in what seemed like non sequiturs; his novels were the same way. So I waited. It was as if no story had a true beginning, so you could always take it back and back.
He had gone there with Nefeli, he said, to Havana, on first diagnosis, when she became obsessed with scorpion venom. It was before things were readily available on the internet, or, at least, available to them. “You had to go to Cuba. Nefeli insisted. So we went to get it and brought it back. It worked, for a while, or seemed to.” Now, she had found an easier way to get it but he didn’t think it was working.
“You went together?” I asked.
“Yes,” he said. “The two of us. She needed someone with her,” he said. “Aris didn’t know,” he added.
“You have a special friendship,” I said.
“Don’t let that fool you. There’s nothing like the bond of marriage. Larger than life.”
I had certainly heard such words before, but their sincerity, from him, shocked me. Do we all become more sentimental in our old age, or wiser? “I hope you will marry,” he said. “I’m sorry it’s not Aris. I wanted you as my daughter-in-law.” Whether he truly believed it, it moved me that he had said it. “When you’re
