It suddenly felt strange to be looking at her, so I retreated, sat back down in my chair. “Also, there’s a fight over the elevator. The people on the first floor don’t want to pay for it. The people on the second floor claim they don’t use it. Finally, the question of how to heat the building, the most fraught of all.”
She laughed. “Good to know.” Her phone rang and she excused herself for a moment. “Hi, Dimitra,” I heard her say as she disappeared inside. She returned moments later, telling me about a boy who was living with her friends Dimitra and Fady and their daughter, Leila. She mentioned a refugee squat nearby, in an old abandoned school, and asked me if I knew of it.
I told her I did not.
A silence hung in the space between us. I see now she must have misinterpreted my reticence, maybe took me to be a nationalist, xenophobic fascist. “You reminded me of something, of the time when I was still working, and the reasons now I’m not.” My opportunity had come, and I could tell from the quiet that she was waiting for me to continue. But my words felt blocked.
“I understand,” she said, finally. Though how could she. I excused myself and said goodnight.
•
The next morning, I picked up Katerina and the kids at the airport. The twins piled into the back seat as if I’d come for them after only a few days’ absence, talking and planning for the birthday party that weekend. Katerina recounted the busy few weeks she’d had, something related to an upcoming funding deadline. As we turned onto our street, one of the more modest of the neighborhood, everything seemed larger and more open than I remembered. The trees seemed greener, the air crisper.
Between the car and the front door, Katerina and the twins were stopped by an eager neighbor. I steered around them, set the suitcases down, and took out my keys. When I opened the front door my chest tightened. The year had rewound—before I lost my job, before living full-time in the Athens apartment—but instead of feeling familiarity, I felt as though I’d stepped into another reality, another version of my life. As Rimbaud famously wrote: I is someone else.
The kids raced to their rooms to charge their devices, back to the house they knew as theirs. Katerina walked in, set the groceries we’d stopped for on the counter. I began to unpack them, as was our custom, and she asked if I was still planning to accompany them to the island over the summer, when she’d take a couple of weeks off. She reminded me that as far as the kids knew, we were only separated because of work. I think Katerina and I often told ourselves the same untruth. There’s a comfort in those things that remain unexpressed.
I reassured her that I planned to come to the island, and Katerina disappeared into the bedroom to take a nap. Ifigenia came out as I was finishing up with the groceries and sat on one of the barstools in the kitchen, playing some internet game I did not understand, complaining about her brother. She wanted sympathy and some lemonade. With their mother, they helped themselves, but when I was around they asked me for things. Can I have some milk will you make me some cereal can you order souvlaki.
There was a new refrigerator, sleek and chrome and tall, and I stood in front of it as though it were a portal. The old refrigerator had been fine. Not particularly old, even, just basic. There was also a new espresso machine, the kind that used not coffee but little pods, which didn’t seem to me like coffee at all. All that pod-waste, drifting in the sea.
I stayed in the kitchen and read at the counter. Eventually, the twins must have fallen asleep as well because the house settled into quiet. The stillness of midday. I considered going outside for a cigarette. Katerina had always asked that we smoke outdoors, and the habit remained. After all these years I have come to prefer it. I like the ritual of stepping out of my space and into another, my balcony an urban observation deck. Even on the ship I smoked in the open air, never in my cabin, never enclosed.
But I decided to skip the cigarette and wandered down to the den, which was on the bottom floor and opened up to a small garden. I sat at the desk and opened the drawers, rifling through my things. I don’t know what I was looking for. The domestic always made me restless, as if I were waiting for something to happen. After I was asked to leave the ship, I cleared out my cabin. One box was filled with little papers I had tacked up everywhere. Katerina found the notecards and Post-its and threw them away. I was enraged and went out to the dumpster in my bathrobe, trying to salvage them. “It was garbage!” Katerina said. She followed me outside. “Scraps of paper. There was nothing there.” But there had been angst on her face.
It was odd, for Katerina had long ago stopped trying to clean out my things. There were things I gave up in marriage but there were things that I would not, and these artifacts now, more than ever, stood as
