Then I felt a strange surge of joy despite the circumstances, and, for the first time in my life, inexplicably free.
That’s when I glanced to the entrance and saw a tall figure there, glowing in the moonlight. I jumped, felt a strange pull behind my belly button, a tingle near the top of my spine. Half fear, half arousal. A man. A light-gray T-shirt and matching sweatpants, like a track star from 1985. Gray running shoes whose bottoms lit up like fireflies. The glint of his glasses. A familiar, pleasant feeling.
The Captain. He looked to the bar, then back to me. I wondered what he saw there, what tableau of loss.
“I didn’t mean to frighten you,” he said. He spoke in Greek. “You startled me, in fact.”
He shifted on his feet, as if ready to break into a run. I became aware that he’d been in my thoughts. I felt a wash of relief—someone else, alive and walking around at this hour. Let alone this someone else.
“I was walking and saw you.”
You as in me? Or you as in a person. I still couldn’t tell if he recognized me. I realized I had not yet spoken and that my silence was probably unsettling. “Do you want to join me?” My voice sounded different: thick and deep. I gestured around the taverna to the seat in front of me, as if it were the middle of the afternoon. For a moment he didn’t move. Didn’t laugh, or even smile. Was he sleepwalking? My mother used to sleepwalk and it always frightened me: she would suddenly be standing in my doorway, laughing, and say something crazy, like, Oh, you! You’re a paper finger! You’ve come for the furniture train, wait for the celery, do you need an umbrella or a bookcase?
I was hesitant. You’re not supposed to wake a sleepwalker. Why? Heart attack? But then he sidled over, as if we were in a crowded bar and had met eyes across the room.
“It would be nice to have something to drink,” he said.
Neither of us said anything for a moment. It was not awkwardness.
“Insomnia?” I asked.
He nodded. “A dangerous place to sleepwalk,” he said, looking past me, over the cliff.
He walked across the dark restaurant to behind the now-empty bar, and then he disappeared into the kitchen, which apparently was not even locked. He came back with a beer and two small tumblers. “Don’t worry,” he said. “The owner is a friend. I’ve been coming here since I was a child.”
I slid my feet off the chair but he sat down next to me—not too close—on the bench; there was something both pal-ish and warm about the gesture. He leaned back and crossed his ankle over his knee. He wore white ankle running socks with a blue stripe at the top. Endearing. His physicality, the everydayness of it. He offered me a cigarette.
“Oh why not.” He lit it for me. “Always quitting.”
“I remember.”
“Your father?” I asked, after a moment.
“He’s fine. Holed up on the hill, in Nefeli’s cottage this whole time. Obsessed with his bees. Something both selfless and self-centered. Careful tending, with no response, no acknowledgment. Honey. In his old age, this sort of careful, repetitive task, wrapped up in solitude, suits him.”
“Okay,” he added. “The truth is, he’s losing his mind.”
“I’m sorry,” I said.
He sighed and looked as though he were ready to divulge some painful secret. We had not been in the habit of talking these last weeks; we had forgotten our rhythms, and anyway, we were not used to the other’s physical presence.
I tried to store his face in my memory then. His hair was graying slightly at the temples and otherwise was nearly blond from the sun. High cheekbones. Behind his glasses, eyes like a big cat. His nose was sunburned; I could tell by the light of the moon. Otherwise, there was a heaviness to the space, a density to his presence, our joint presence here that was somehow pitched at an angle to everything else.
The rest of the world was quiet, and the Captain began to speak.
“So I’d been right. Katerina is in love. She swears nothing has happened, that she did not cheat. Anyway, I hate that word, cheat: to act dishonorably to obtain something advantageous. The word alone makes a mockery of marriage. Besides, how can she help the way she feels? I’m not telling you about my moments of jealousy, irrational rage, or the circular conversations I’ve put her through, exhausting us both. I suppose at times I was furious, but I knew I had no right to be.
“Everything I do in life feels like an atonement for earlier behavior. My last day on the ship, when we arrived at Piraeus, my quartermaster informed me that our supervisor was waiting for me. He’d come in from the company’s headquarters in Brussels. I knew he was there for other business as well, but I also knew that the main point was to see me. I packed my bags, took down the notecards and photos and things I would miss. I knew that I would not sleep in that small cabin again. The walk to his office was a long one.
“‘We know you were acting out of kindness, not malice,’ he said.
“Of course it was kindness. It was beyond kindness. It was duty. Collusion with smugglers, they said. That would assume I’d been rewarded, and I had not. Someone I trusted had come to me, asked for help. It was humanitarian, I thought. Not criminal. Facilitating migration was the charge. Well, yes. Isn’t that also what a ship captain does? Language, here, will distort, and when you take something too literally it nearly disappears. But it’s true I had looked the other way. It had seemed like the right thing to do.
“Anyway. For me, nothing feels more dispiriting than the idea of staying in one place, yet for some I know it’s a luxury. And each
