The Art of the Walk

It was still an ungodly hour. I stood at the edge of the harbor, taking deep breaths, the water giving off a saline, fishy smell, as well as that of motorboat fuel mingled with the acrid tannin aroma of surrounding trees. The sun had not yet appeared and neither had the horizon. In preparation for the rose bloom of dawn, early shadows began to form around the moored fishing boats. The slow lapping of water matched my breath.

I was supposed to have breakfast with Emma, but it was too early. I would walk. East or west, a mental coin flip, and I trudged west along a road not well asphalted, the beach to my right. A cold, intense blue drifted in the air.

I scuffed through mud, among the sodden seethe of leaves, following a bend that looped me around the northern part of the island. The landscape was not as pristine as I’d hoped. Various dwellings interrupted the unpeopled scenery, all occupied by NGOs, it seemed: a house and garden for Doctors Without Borders, a building blazing with mildew and a tent campsite for the Spanish lifeguards, a motor home that distributed food. A confusing cardboard sign nailed to a pine tree said doctor 16:00–11:00 p.m., with an arrow pointing in the same direction I was walking. A sign pointing in the other direction was for a medical bus called Adventist Help, but the cardboard had aged so much the writing was barely legible, which made me wonder whether the Seventh-day Adventists had packed their bus and driven off. Another sign farther along offered free clothing; underneath it lay a dozen large garbage bags. Were refugees supposed to take morning walks and then rifle through the black garbage bags for outfits that fit? Strange was this world of volunteering. Along a fence full of constellations of woodworm holes, an aspiring artist had hung a series of the orange life vests abandoned by refugees after the crossing, three above each other, then two, then three, then two, like the workout graphs on treadmills. A little farther, red life vests were hung in the shape of a heart.

I should take morning walks when I get home, though that might upset Francine. She takes a power walk every day along the lake, winter, spring, summer, except if we’re having one of those berserk snowstorms. This is her solitary time away from me, no distractions. She leaves her phone behind. It would be selfish of me to take that away from her. Even if I walked in a different direction, it would still be an imposition. I mentioned walking to her once years ago. Fine, she said, but why didn’t I walk on an elliptical at the gym, better for my creaky knees and all that. I did so for a while, but I didn’t like the fact that I’d exert so much effort and remain in place.

Mazen is a walker as well. When he last visited me two years ago, he dragged me all over the city, from Hyde Park to Rogers Park, from the Loop to Oak Park, for hours and hours. I ended up with blisters. He loved the flatness of the city compared to Beirut, loved the unbroken sidewalks, the lack of car horns. I must have lost five pounds during his time with me, but not Mazen. He was always a mite rotund, even as a child, no weight loss no matter how much he ate or dieted.

I noticed footprints in the mud, different from those I was making. Someone had walked this road barefoot. I could see the heel impressions and the oval depressions of the toes. Was it a volunteer or a refugee? Since no boats had landed on this side of the island for a few days, the prints probably belonged to a drunk volunteer returning late. I turned around and began my walk back to the square.

The village was waking up, the square’s pulse weak but getting stronger. The night raised its dark backside gingerly. A young woman inside the aquarium café from the night before took chairs off tables. A fisherman cleaned the outboard motor of his boat. Mourning doves cooed passionately under the eaves of a restaurant. And an unexpected sight in this rustic vista, a cross-dressing villager sitting leg over leg on a wooden chair underneath the plane tree, with a cigarette that glowed into sudden life. An antique bronze kettle of coffee, its top covered with a saucer, waited on the stone wall next to the chair. A calico lay across the cross-dresser’s lap, purring loudly, offering her elongated neck for petting. We are everywhere, I thought. I wondered briefly how long I would have to withhold gendering, what clue would be offered. The red dress was much too short for cold weather, particularly without nylons or socks, hairy legs bared; a worn charcoal duffel coat was shorter than the dress. No wig, short, misbehaving white hair, no makeup. He likely identified as a man, a middle-aged guy in a red dress and sensible black pumps. He would later confirm my assumption. He had a smile on his face as he bent forward and whispered to the cat, definitely a morning person. An old Greek widow—stereotypical mourning black including head scarf, cane, and wicker basket—approached him, chatted for a minute. She petted the cat and continued toward the harbor.

When he noticed me, he said something that sounded like kaliméra, hesitated, and followed with a good morning. I raised an eyebrow and pointed to the chair next to him, asking if I could sit. I then had to decline his offer of a cigarette. His English was nonexistent. Did I speak German? No, I didn’t. Did he speak French, mais bien sûr, Madame. His name was Nikolaos, of course. I’d known three Greeks in my life and all were named Nick or Nikolaos and so was every other Greek Orthodox boy in Lebanon. He’d spent a couple of years in Paris in his youth, such a lovely city, but not livable. A local man with a large duffel bag and a riotous beard came over, nodded toward me in acknowledgment, then launched into some funny Greek story. Nikolaos, now vibrant and animated, responded with something funnier, because riotous beard guy literally doubled over. He hauled his bag toward the harbor, still chuckling, his oversize stomach rising and falling like a busy pump. I asked Nikolaos what that was about and he unsuccessfully tried to explain. He asked where I was from, what I was doing in Skala Sikamineas. I told him I was a naturalized American, originally Lebanese, my mother was Syrian, and I was here because I wanted to help. He suggested I wasn’t like the others. There must have been other trans volunteers, I told him. I knew of at least one.

“You’re trans?” he said. “I thought you were, you know, just a dyke.”

“I’m that as well,” I said.

He said I was different because I talked to him—well, more than talked since a number of the European volunteers did so, but I was willing to have a conversation, not talk at him or tell him what to do. I told him to give me a little time; my wife complained all the time that I told everyone what to do. He found that mildly amusing. He explained that these volunteers, be they European or American, behaved exactly like the German tourists who arrived every summer full of imperious airs and left with shellacked skin and complaints about the chaos that was the island.

“Can you imagine?” he said. “Some Germans would give us advice on cooking. Think about that for a moment.”

His eyes slanted toward the temples and bulged as if he had Graves’ disease, in the early stages of exophthalmos, which gave him a strange look, almost like he had compound eyes with an abnormally wide angle of vision. What struck me more were his black pumps. How he could walk in them on these half-ass streets was beyond me. I tried wearing pumps a couple of times some thirty years ago, and it was a no-go, no way, not on your or anyone else’s life.

Lesbos was a sleepy island. Nikolaos joked that their supply of things to happen had run out when Sappho was laid to rest. Things that happened happened elsewhere. But when the Syrian refugees first arrived, the entire village, the whole island, mobilized to help. No islander would ever leave another human being at the mercy of capricious waves, no matter who they were. That was the law of the sea. Why, that same man with the riotous beard once saved twenty-three refugees whose boat had capsized. He happened to be fishing in the area when he heard screams—men, women, children, and babies. Twenty-three people on that boat of his was neither safe nor smart but necessary. None of the refugees knew how to swim; none of them had even seen the sea before they made their crossing. As soon as a villager saw a boat, there would be a call and all would come out to help, even Nikolaos, though not in his black pumps. The country was in the worst recession in recent memory, no thanks to the Germans, yet villagers opened their homes, shared their meals, donated their clothes. Sometimes there were thirty or forty people sleeping in one house. The NGOs and the volunteers came. They thought they were doing God’s work and they expected the villagers to serve them.

“They came because the situation was overwhelming,” I said. “The numbers multiplied exponentially. You know that. It’s a human disaster.”

“Of course,” he said. “But all these Northern Europeans think they fart higher than their ass.”

I hadn’t heard the idiom before, and when sylphlike Emma, also in pumps, made her grand appearance, Nikolaos and I were in the midst of giggling like preteen schoolgirls. I had to introduce them to each other; they hadn’t met, which was not a revelation since I knew Emma was not fond of drag queens, let alone cross-dressers. She felt their existence belittled who she was. She turned down our invitation to sit. She wanted breakfast and, more important, a cup of coffee. I startled her by asking Nikolaos if he wished to join us, but he declined, pointing to his coffee cup and the calico sleeping on his lap.