This is not her story. She stole it from the young woman who did not realize until the end that it was hers.
She lived in a small apartment in the oldest quarter of an ancient city, the rent having been paid for in an act of charity. She had made a friend of the priest thanks to her frequent visitations to his little church, and he had come to learn of her financial straits and had managed to offer for free the small space with one bedroom and a window overlooking the square without making her feel shame. He needn’t have worried. She was not a person much inclined to shame. On her daily walks down the neighborhood’s ancient streets, she boasted to each shopkeeper or waiter of the enthusiastic reception she had received from the one before. She sometimes told these men of her good fortune to be taken in by the church, and even then she arranged the story to convince her listeners it was the church and not she herself who should be grateful of the arrangement. Her listeners were almost always men, for even in her advanced years she was possessed of classic Hellenic beauty—the same beauty of the statues in the new museum just a few streets from the little square. It was said in the neighborhood that on the day a giant crane had lifted the ancient statues from the old museum over the rooftops to deposit them into the new, the men had joined the old woman in the square to watch, looking from the marble forms aloft, to her, and back up again, remarking on the likeness.
When the young woman stopped at the old woman’s apartment to deliver a basket of fresh figs from the priest’s family while he was still at weekday service, no one would have expected her to stay for conversation, especially not the young woman herself who had something else to do. But our story thief, our beauty—Irini is what we will call her—invited the young woman up for tea and encouraged her to eat two figs from the basket and poured a glass of lukewarm water for her to drink, and she did not send the young woman down the stairs into the square until the rooftop cinema across the way had begun its early show and bats were swooping through the mulberry trees.
This is not the old woman’s story. It is the story of the young woman who arrived that day with the first figs of the season to drop off and left to find her mobile alive with messages she had not even thought to listen for. Where are U, Anna? Anna. Can’t stay longer. C U later heading home. Anna: we will give her this name as simple and symmetrical as that of the old woman. She put the mobile in the back pocket of her jeans and swung her leg over the motorbike she had locked to the lamppost many hours before and drove away.
Her friends did not in fact go home to the apartments where they lived still or again with their parents, crammed into the formerly gracious spaces with high ceilings and tall cupboards that had once held gowns and suits. They went instead from the square where they had messaged Anna to another square in another part of the city and forgot about Anna until she arrived on her bike, knowing she would find someone there to have a drink with. This was a run-down quarter of the city, once the location of silk mills where worms had munched on mulberry leaves in broad trays beneath glass ceiling panes. Now the streets were lined with decrepit houses that gave space to buzzing galleries and bars. Anna’s friends sat at one of these, the one with the caged parakeet by the espresso machine, and looked up at her with mixed surprise and indignation. What happened to her? They’d given up. No, they hadn’t gone home after all because what were they thinking, it was Friday. Not that it mattered to them what day of the week it was since none of them had jobs that adhered to any sort of weekday schedule. They were artists, musicians, actors. They were, like so many of their generation in the aftermath of the great economic crisis, unemployed.
Anna chained her motorbike to a railing and dragged a chair across the cement into place at her friends’ table. She drew out cigarettes and her lighter from her jeans, lit one, sat back, and said, “Hey.”
“We waited for you.”
“I know. Sorry.”
“You never picked up.”
She said all this in its Greek equivalent, having learned the language early and quite thoroughly from her immigrant parents in the United States. She knew, for instance, that the Greek version of the casual hey of an American was to say, upon arriving, come.
Anna’s friends didn’t know how frequently she went to church, and she preferred to keep them in ignorance. It was not cool to be twenty-seven years old and attending the liturgy. It was not cool to like not only the scent of incense and the refreshing air of the tiny stone building with the plush red carpet down its stubby nave, but also the serene eyes of the icons and the priest’s words promising of something exalted. So, she said only that she had had an errand and let the friends think she had been engaged in one of the many regular tussles with bureaucracy they all engaged in on their own behalf or for their parents. Perhaps she had been paying her parents’ phone bill. Perhaps she had been registering her motorbike, or perhaps she had been in a pharmacy line for contraception. All of these could have taken long enough to have made her ignore her messages and meet her friends by accident and late.
When the waiter came, she ordered beer and listened to the conversation among her friends, but finally could not resist.
“I met this cool old lady. In Plaka,” she said, naming the ancient city quarter with the little square and the rooftop cinema.
“OK.”
The friends went back to their conversation.
“No, guys. She was really cool. Not what you’re thinking.”
“What are we thinking?” They laughed. “You met a Yia-Yiá.”
They shrugged and went on talking. Their lives were populated with old women in the figures of their grandmothers and great-aunts, and Anna’s news of meeting yet one more struck them as neither rare nor particularly desirable.
“No. I don’t know,” Anna said. “I wasn’t going to stay. But she invited me in. She told me stories about Plaka. She’s lived there her whole life.”
“A snob, then.”
“An aristocrat.”
“No,” Anna said. “I don’t think so.” She realized she did not know this to be true. The old woman’s social class was muddled by her dependence on the church. But she must have been well-to-do once. In the apartment there were silver picture frames arrayed on a walnut sideboard and leather-covered books in a case. Her clothes were nothing fancy—a twill skirt and a blouse with buttons down the front and a man’s collar—but she wore them with a sort of flair that had made Anna reconsider her own high-tops with the tongues pulled out and the tight ruching of her black tank top.
“Maybe a snob,” she said. “Or maybe upper class. But not a snob.”
Anna’s beer came, and in the time she took to drink a few big gulps of the lager, the conversation moved on to other stories, tales of other parties, jokes someone had said, moments of comical failure at a club or on the beach. Anna pretended to listen while she thought back to Irini and her little apartment and how, when Anna had licked her fingers from the figs, Irini had jumped up, spry for a woman that age—an age Anna couldn’t quite place—and returned from her kitchen with an embroidered napkin. The initials on the napkin were ΕΣ. Irini S. The priest had not told Anna the last name of the woman to whom she was to bring the figs. Miss Irini, he had said, and told her to ring the second bell from the bottom. The label had come off.
And what had occupied their time, hers and Irini’s, while Anna ate the figs? The woman had told her how Plaka had been before the war, when all the houses were still old and neo-classical, tall structures with French doors and balconies that seemed to Anna more Parisian than Greek when she passed one of the few remaining. The building in which Irini lived was new and ugly, with concrete mottled on purpose in panels across the front to create a sense of decoration. Anna had not noticed this when she had arrived, but had stood in the twilit square looking up at it before she had unlocked the motorbike to leave. She had caught a glimpse of Irini moving across her window. Irini had told her of her own family home, damaged nineteen years ago in the great earthquake of 1999 and too expensive to repair. Irini said no more about either that house or the parents she had inherited it from or the husband she had lived with in it. When Anna finally stood to go, she drew close to the picture frames and saw in one a man with blue eyes and slicked-back hair, and in another a child—a daughter—and then a young woman, and then the same young woman older and with a little boy. My grandson, Irini had said.
The boy had what Anna assumed were his grandfather’s blue eyes, and in the photo he held up to the camera a piece of wrapping paper in one hand and in the other a tambourine. He seemed to be sitting in the lap of his mother, who looked to be a bit older than Anna. Just a bit older than Anna and already the mother of a little boy. As Anna had woven through the narrow streets from Irini’s apartment and through the traffic at the roundabout by Omonia to reach Metaxourgeio and her friends, she had thought about what it would be like to have a child now instead of this life of snatching up jobs and internships as they drifted by, lingering in the old warehouses where the new bars set up their spots, and taking spray cans to the sides of apartment blocks to paint the street art pieces and murals her new friends had encouraged her to paint. She couldn’t really think of it.
Her mind went to her own childhood, not in Athens, not in Greece, but in America where her parents had dropped the suffix from their name and never cooked a lamb or octopus and sent her almost grudgingly to visit with cousins she barely knew in an Athens suburb the year she turned fourteen. That summer she had fallen off a Vespa driven by the boy cousin with little regard for his obligatory passenger. The boy’s mother had daubed her leg with Mercurochrome and slapped her hand later when she tried to pick at the long scab. She wondered what it would be like now to have a little girl like the child Anna herself had been—in skirts and dresses and always wanting bows in her hair. Anna couldn’t imagine it. Your grandson’s cute, she had told Irini as she moved into the hall toward the front door to the apartment. He is in high school now, the old woman had replied.
Once the young woman Anna was gone, Irini double-locked the door to the apartment and crossed back to the living room to clean up after her visitor. As she bent toward the coffee table, Irini noticed the girl standing in the square and looking up at her windows. She considered waving to the girl but pretended not to have seen. She took up the bowl of figs and the glasses with a finger in each one so that they clinked together the way they did for the waiter at her most frequented taverna, and she drifted back into her tiny kitchen. The girl had left behind a fug of sweat and cigarette smoke, and Irini returned to the living room with an atomizer of perfume—a decades-old Fracas she used so sparingly that it had lasted—to clear the smell away. Irini had never taken up smoking, though she understood the fascination. For a brief period during the summer when she had been courted by the man who would become her husband, she had attempted to adopt the habit. But the smoke had made her eyes sting and their watering had in turn smudged her mascara on those nights sitting at the rooftop bars of elegant hotels or in the planted terraces inside the Royal garden. So, she had relinquished cigarettes and had foregone this opportunity for glamour. Her husband smoked a pipe.
She examined the living room and set to straightening the picture frames that Anna had picked up to look at. She smoothed the fabric on the couch and on the chair that she herself had sat in and looked once more at the photographs of her daughter and grandson and of her husband when he was young. Not your type, she said to his image. She said nothing to the photos of her daughter—as a girl and as a mother with her boy—but pressed her lips together in concern. She had told Anna she did not see her daughter, and had allowed for the likely inference about a mother with a teenaged son that these two members of younger generations were too busy for the older woman. She did not see her daughter or her grandson, and she was in fact quite busy on her own. She had two pinochle games and a book club and the need for time in which to read each month’s selection—which was currently the first volume of Proust translated into Greek and which Irini was attempting in the original. She prided herself on her French accent and often earned delighted praise from tourists who wandered through the little square and sought help from her in French-inflected English. In their own tongue, she would then tell them how to get to the Acropolis—this was the only question she was ever asked. Turn left at the far corner of the square, she would tell the tourists, pass the fruit seller on the left, and then turn right onto the pedestrian boulevard. Sometimes, if the tourists seemed especially attentive, she might tell them how the traffic had once surged in chaos where they were about to walk, or how the art deco mansions along the boulevard were slated for demolition. Or she might even tell them of the statues that had been moved from the old museum to the new. She did not overdo this. She was careful, sensitive to her audiences. She would not risk being seen as a doddering old fool who had so few people to speak to that she broke into conversation at the slightest opportunity.
She was busy most days, and this did not even take into account her time spent in the church or speaking with the priest or, every now and then, joining him and his family for lunch at one of the tavernas. He was a young priest. Irini knew he was thought of as a hip priest. His children—two boys—played soccer with him between courses at lunch, passing a red mini-ball back and forth while Irini thought of things to say to their mother. She generally enjoyed these meals and made a show of offering to pay for a pastry tarte at meal’s end. The priest never accepted, having already gone into the kitchen to ensure that the waiter would bring the bill only to him. He assumed that Irini wanted the pastry for herself and so ordered it for the table to share, and this was added to the bill at the priest’s expense. Irini preferred ice cream to pastry, and so she took only the smallest bites and trusted the boys to eat the rest. Their father never noticed this when their lunches ended and Irini said goodbye and thank you and turned the corner for the kiosk and not home. She would buy herself a Magnum ice cream and eat almost all of it there under the kiosk’s awning before it melted and she lost the chocolate coating to the cobblestones.
On cooler days she sometimes bought two Magnums, if she could trust the second one to survive the walk home. She pulled one Magnum now from the small collection in her freezer and returned with it and a china plate to the living room. The sun had gone down and the Acropolis was lit, and she sat in her chair and watched the walls of the ancient palisade and the illuminated columns of the Parthenon as if they were her television.
And what did she think of as she gazed on the stone and marble? She thought first of the Sound and Light shows on the Acropolis, donated to Greece by the French nation, and how she used to take her daughter to the shows at the end of every school year. She thought of the lights moving up an ancient path to match the prerecorded sound of sandals on gravel as the runner Pheidippides came from Marathon to announce Greek victory in battle and then collapsed into death. She thought of the Proust and how the man had made a career from illness and how she could do the same herself, if she stayed inside her tiny apartment. Except she was not ill. Old, but not ill. High blood pressure that was common even for those much younger than her eighty-two years, and a cataract that had clouded her vision. But that had been taken care of and she could see even better out of that once-cloudy eye and needed no correction. She had popped the left lens out of the glasses she used at home where no one would comment on her frugality.
She was not ill as Proust had been—if he had been. Irini considered always the possibility—though in her view it was far more than possible—that people told themselves as many lies as they told others. Proust’s illness might have been the tale he told himself, the ancient marathoner’s health the lie he told to his commanders who sent him on the errand that killed him. She thought then of the girl, Anna, whom she realized she should call a woman and not a girl since at Anna’s age Irini had already lived through two wars. The girl—the word had already become a habit—had not even lived through the military junta. She had not even seen the roundups of political prisoners and after seven years the arrival of new freedoms and the gathering up of all the junta flags and hiding them away in favor of the new flags of the republic. She was born after all that. The girl had come to Greece knowing none of it.
Not that they had spoken of all this, but Irini could tell. There was a certain bright-eyed nature to this girl and there was her hopefulness about the church—rare in someone of her generation, though likely the hip priest had something to do with that. But here she was, this child so young she was born after everything, arriving into a country to take up a job when there were hardly any to be had, thanks to the crisis, working in a gallery, she had said, for little money. Yes, that was the important detail, the tendency of young people to call a job something they did for free for someone else. Irini would call this charity. This was a strange thing about the young. They gave so much away even as they were always looking for what someone else could give them. Irini was neither fool nor hypocrite. She relied on the munificence of the kind priest and his church, and about that, she claimed few falsehoods.
So, Anna had come here for this job at an art gallery and when every Greek her age wanted to leave the country, she had stayed. Thanks to a passport from her parents’ Greek birth, she could stay as long as she liked. When Anna said the word for passport, Irini heard the accent. It was not strong, but it was there. The girl could almost pass for native, but if you really listened you could hear that she was something else instead.
The buzz of noise from the square grew suddenly louder, and Irini checked her watch. The Timex had been her husband’s and the black band was cracked and far too loose on her wrist, and yet she wore it with the large face that knocked against her wristbone. Just after eleven. Over at the rooftop cinema, the credits were scrolling against the screen, which was in actuality the blank wall of the adjacent building. The audience members were spilling out of the lobby and into the square, and she could hear people making plans for dinner or drinks. Irini rose—something she still did easily and without pressing up on the arms of the chair—and fetched the Proust from the bedroom and took the book to the kitchen and began to read while she waited for her kettle to boil. She would drink a chamomile and read for one hour before bed.
This was all happening in a city that had its way of keeping people apart and then thrusting them together as if by some heaving of tectonic plates, in a gentler version of the heaving that had seriously damaged Irini’s family home and that several times a year rattled the china and the flat-screen televisions inside its millions of apartments. Not long after Anna had first arrived to work for no pay in the gallery, one such earthquake had knocked to the polished marble floor several artworks fortunately fashioned from canvas and unglazed. Alone in the space, she had hunched in a doorway while plaster drifted from the walls of the high transoms and a car alarm wailed outside the door. The day after Anna took the figs to Irini’s house, a Saturday, she went to the gallery to work, and Irini went out for her walk around the neighborhood, and though they were only a few hundred meters apart, they did not cross paths until the Sunday.
Sunday, Irini went for morning mass to the church with the stubby nave and took her customary seat beside a column where she rested her head against the stone. In the summer the column was cooler than the rest of the church, which was almost cool enough. She closed her eyes to listen better to the liturgical singing of the young priest and to rid her mind of the image of him with his priestly bun resembling too much the sort of hairstyle sported by the secular young men of the city. The last time she had seen him, her grandson had affected such a style, with a portion of his hair bound up on top of his head as if he had forgotten to form a complete ponytail out of it. This priest was so young that sometimes she mistook him for her grandson’s age. He must have been not much older when he had married and had the first of his two boys.
Because her eyes were closed, Irini did not see Anna arrive and take up a seat across the aisle from her, though she did sense an alteration in the scent of the space, a shift in the incense toward something even darker and richer. This was a scent Irini recognized from tourists who sat in the little square sometimes with small dogs at their feet and thick leashes of rope they draped over their wrists. She knew from the waiters that these tourists spent even less money than the Greek young people who sat for hours over a single inexpensive coffee. The waiters complained to her and did not seem to mind that Irini herself spent even less than all of them, for most of the time she paid only in a greeting as she passed the cafés and earned in exchange another round of praise for her agility. The waiters did not use this word—they exhorted imaginary listeners to look at her—but Irini knew that this was what they meant. They knew from her talk of the war how old she must be—she did nothing to conceal her age—and she knew they expected her to be barely able to put one foot before the other, and not to tramp to the Acropolis on the days of free admission or to carry her shopping in her string bag instead of pushing it in a little cart over the cobbles like the other women of her generation.
Irini opened her eyes to see the source of the offending scent that reminded her of the broke tourists and saw it was the young girl Anna. Irini recognized the odor of stale cigarettes and sweat that had lingered in her apartment after the girl had brought the figs, mixed now with the scent—it was patchouli—that she found particularly odious. Anna sat with her eyes closed and her head leaning like Irini’s against the answering column on the other side. Anna did this not to cool the back of her head but to sense the priest’s words—though she did not always understand the ecclesiastical Greek—as coming to her from somewhere beyond this touristed corner of the ancient city where she was still subject to the calls of gift-shop owners.
When Anna had first arrived in the city, she had brought with her a wardrobe she thought fitting for a gallery assistant but had soon learned that the black of her clothing was too hot for all but the deepest winter days and, in the spring, had stood out far too starkly against the bright stones and the brighter light that surrounded her. Her shoes had proved dangerously slippery on the sidewalks of cement that had been polished to a shine as if they were as ancient as the steps to the Acropolis, where she had seen a woman fall and break her hip. So, she had converted to the high-top sneakers with the pulled-out tongue and the skinny jeans and tight-fitting tops she had seen at the cafés of Metaxourgeio. On days when a new exhibit opened, she threw a blazer over the tight tops and this was enough. The gallery owner was almost never there except in winter, preferring to spend the warm weather on an island in the Aegean, and the artists who did come in seemed to see a kinship between themselves and her.
Though she did not always understand the formal language of the liturgy, Anna expected by now to seem like a native. And still whenever she walked a few blocks into the Plaka, the shopkeepers addressed her in English, a language she used now only on her weekly Skype calls with her parents, who drifted into the tongue of their daughter’s American upbringing. They spoke English with the faint accents of Greek America, while Anna was beginning to bring a delicate Hellenic cadence to her English speech. It seemed to her that for the first time in her life she and her parents spoke the same language: Greek-accented English. She tried once to hold the weekly Skype call in her parents’ native tongue and found she had outstripped them. She quickly turned to English to spare them all the embarrassment of this strange linguistic exile.
She was to call her parents that night, as she did each Sunday. This had been her request, not theirs. They had seen it as nothing or almost nothing to be in a land not your own, having embarked for the United States in their twenties without knowing anyone at their destination. And they reminded Anna that Greece was not really foreign to her. Her parents had been disappointed to discover that Astoria was the strange, hyphenated hybrid that was wholly neither of its two terms. The residents of Astoria were neither truly Greek, like Anna’s parents, nor quite American, and so Anna and her parents had become an island unto themselves within that enclave of Queens. They did not send Anna to Greek school at the local church, insisting quite correctly that, even for the faithful, churchgoing was not a custom of their country. They did not socialize with their neighbors, preferring instead to make American friends—they stressed the word with the weight of fantasy—but struggling to find them. Anna’s parents pointed to the summer visit when she was fourteen as if it had cemented her identity as someone of the place. All it had given her had been a scar on her knee and a few cotton shirts she had worn in America only once before realizing the garments were made solely for the tourist trade and also quite decidedly out of place outside of Greece.
What would she tell her parents in today’s call? She had not yet told them about her church attendance and would not do so today either. Anna knew that hardly any Greeks attended liturgy on Sundays, even among the most devout. Most Greeks required the special occasion of a holiday or a milestone event in their own lives—an important journey or a rite of passage—before they would go to church, and then mostly as a kind of good-luck superstition. She would perhaps find another way to tell her parents about the old lady Irini, concocting a different story for how they had met. Or perhaps she would say nothing of her at all. The woman had come into her life one afternoon and had already passed out of it. An idea had formed in Anna’s mind that her meeting with the woman, with its conversation and cup of tea, carried about it something illicit, despite having been arranged by Father Emmanouil.
She listened to him now, realizing he had shifted from the melodic chanting of the service to his spoken homily. She opened her eyes and saw that his attention was focused across the aisle. She shifted her gaze just enough to conceal her focus on anything besides the holy setting and saw the old lady herself in the seat that was counterpart to Anna’s own. She made to tuck her hair behind her ear and looked again more closely. Yes, it was Irini, with white hair cropped in what would have seemed a pixie cut on a woman of Anna’s generation, in a collared blouse and trim skirt like those she had worn before. Irini was a widow but Anna took note of the fact that unlike others she did not wear only black. Her blouse today was a pale but electric blue and her skirt a charcoal gray.
The priest smiled, at Irini it seemed, and then signaled with his eyes toward Anna. Anna caught a movement from across the aisle and turned fully, feigning new surprise at the acquaintance. Irini dipped her head in Anna’s direction and smiled. The smile was yielded rather than offered, as if the woman shared Anna’s sense of the illicit nature of their connection. In fact, Irini was annoyed to be drawn out from the conversation she was conducting with her God and with which she felt the priest at least should be trusted not to interfere.
Seeing Irini’s smile, the priest looked out upon the congregation, his introductions now complete. The congregation that day numbered six. Besides Anna and Irini, there were two old women in black, clearly widows. Irini knew the women and tried to avoid all association with them as she knew them to be her age. She considered them living reminders of how close they all were to death. She should have embraced these memento mori as license for her own electric blues and oranges and greens. But Irini did not like even to approach the widows lest their nearness to death become contagious and lest she somehow be compelled to trade her colors for their somber and penitent attire. A few rows behind the old women were two young men Anna’s age from Ethiopia who had arrived in Athens two years ago from Addis Ababa. Oumer had worked as a barista there and Tamrat as a journalist, and they had met in the Ethiopian Orthodox church in another part of Athens. They had left Ethiopia not out of desperation—and in fact were fed up with the assumption made by so many Athenians that they were economic refugees. Tamrat had, at least, had cause for a quick departure, since his reporting often put him on the wrong side of the leading party. But Oumer had come to Greece because of Santorini. In a film he had seen a man free-running through a north African city, and this had led him to take up the sport of parkour. It was on the terraced buildings of Santorini that the world’s best ran and leapt and swung and twirled. And more than Oumer was a barista, he was, now, a member of a team of free-runners with their own matching tracksuits and their routes around the city’s parks and construction sites, and sometimes he arrived in church with smears of red dust along a tracksuited knee or hip.
Oumer and Tamrat had left the Ethiopian church in Nea Kypseli and arrived at this church in Plaka with the stubby nave because they shared a frustration with the ethnic politics of the priest. They had become apostates of their own home Orthodoxy and chosen this of all of Athens’ churches. Father Emmanouil’s welcome of them had been fueled in part by his enthusiasm to share his experiences of Lalibela where Oumer’s and Tamrat’s Christian ancestors had carved cruciform churches down into the living rock. The priest had traveled there just before attending seminary, before his marriage, before his own country had become an accidental destination for those hoping to reach greater European prosperity farther north. So, when Anna had first arrived, he had delighted in introducing her to Oumer and Tamrat and in telling this newcomer from America his story of his travels and his backpack and the churches in the rock. Her arrival at Father Emmanouil’s little church, and her regular return for Sunday liturgies, was a small miracle the priest greeted with excitement and relief, though he quickly gave up hope that the girl would lead her young friends to join her and swell his congregation.
When the service finished, the priest accompanied his congregants toward the entrance, where the heat of the city was as solid as a wall. The two widows left quickly, not wishing to be seen to socialize with the Ethiopians who, in their eyes, were marked as undesirable by their nationality and by the color of their skin. Nothing Father Emmanouil had said to them could convince the women otherwise, and they determined that their attendance at church most Sundays more than made up for their opinions. Irini lingered, for she wished to thank the priest for the figs, and it pleased her to ask the Ethiopians about their week within earshot of the widows who would purse their lips together at the untoward behavior of someone who should have been like them. Irini could not afford to venture to the coffee shop where Oumer currently worked, and Oumer was not yet in a position to serve her coffees on the house, but she had promised him that when he did open his own shop, as was his stated plan, she would be among his first customers for coffee served in the gracious way of his homeland. When she had said this, she had cautioned that, of course, she might not still be alive by then, and she had made her customary tip forward of the head to accept Oumer’s compliment for how ageless she both seemed and was. She did not mention that she would be the kind of customer whose business comes at a cost to the barista.
The girl Anna was there by the entrance too, and the truth was that Irini realized she had been seeing the girl at Sunday liturgy for weeks now but had never paid attention to her until she had appeared in the foyer of the apartment building and Irini had buzzed her in not knowing who it was. This was a practice that the priest’s wife disapproved of and scolded Irini for, but Irini did not see the trouble as, at her age, she had little to lose and less to be stolen and sometimes those who came into the building offered coupons and free samples. In this way, she had over the years obtained a very nice lavender soap and a free ice cream and a set of plastic cups. So, when the girl had stood at the base of the steps in the foyer that led up to the old cage-style elevator and Irini had peered over the railing from the second floor, she had vaguely recognized her but without knowing from where. She would have let the girl in even without that hint of recognition, for the girl said Father Emmanouil had sent her and she had held a basket of figs with both hands on the handle. She had made Irini think of Little Red Riding Hood and, in that case, if the fairy tale were to serve, Irini would have been either dead already or a wolf in disguise. Again, and always, she had nothing to lose and the potential of reward from extending an invitation to the girl to come on up.
Today she had come to the church to show her appreciation and respect for the priest, her landlord, as if the service were a play or a recital he performed for which he would require an audience. And she had come also to complain to God, to scold him for his uncooperative nature of late. Listen, she had told him before she had seen the priest making meaningful gestures with his eyes to the young girl across the aisle. Listen, God, I know you think you needn’t bother with me at my age of eighty-two, but I’m still here and I show no sign of disappearing, unless you have some rash and frankly unfair plans for me. So, give me, please, a little peace in the hip joints. Is that too much to ask? Because I don’t fancy switching to flat shoes, and I have spent a lifetime negotiating these cobbled streets in heels and don’t intend to change my habits now. And didn’t we speak already about the cost of electricity? You’re going to have to find me something to do to make more money—which I think could be difficult because, again, let me remind you, I am eighty-two and you and I both know I have not lost my looks, but there is little I can do with them now. And what would I do? Join Oumer at his espresso bar? She had chuckled to herself then and that must have been what had set the priest to his meaningful glances. But this was not funny, she had gone on, and if her God found this amusing then he was not the sort of God she could place her faith in after all. He had better get to work and either bring the government to its senses so they could lower the taxes on electricity so she could keep her fan running when it was very hot, or convince Father Emmanouil, who worked for him, after all, to include utilities with the free rent he was already providing.
Now that the service was over, she told the priest how much she had enjoyed it and said her hellos to Oumer and Tamrat and said a polite hello to the girl Anna. Before she could depart—her irritated prayer had made her more eager than usual for solitude—the priest asked her to another Sunday lunch. Join us, he said to Irini, meaning his family, and yet the girl Anna assumed that it was she who was indicated by the plural.
“Oh, yes, do,” she said to Irini, and then she thanked the priest for the opportunity, which, Irini could see from the discomfiture he tried to hide, he had not intended. It would be rude of him to pay for Irini’s lunch and not Anna’s and so, with the girl joining them, he would have to justify the expense of two lunch guests as church business, and though the Greek Orthodox church had lots of money, the priest’s particular establishment depended on a small budget and the infrequent benefactions of a Plaka-born shipping magnate.
“Of course,” he said and then repeated his invitation. “Please come today, Irini. Though the boys will be sad to hear they missed you.” The boys were spending the day with his wife’s parents. The boys, Irini was sure, would miss not her but the pastry of which she would have let them eat the lion’s share. But thinking of the pastry made her think of the ice cream she could have instead—since her lunch would be paid for and she would thus have less spending on the day’s food and she would require only a yogurt and a boiled egg for her supper before bed, following so large a meal at midday. So, she agreed and tried not to notice the great enthusiasm of the girl. Didn’t this Anna have better places to go? Shouldn’t she be on the back of a motorbike headed to a beach, instead of having lunch in Plaka with a priest’s family and an old woman? Irini said exactly this to her and watched the girl’s face turn a deep crimson as she searched for a reply.
“Don’t mind Irini,” the priest said. And Irini snapped a frowning face toward him. “She says what she thinks, but she never means you harm.”
The priest knew nothing about Irini’s intentions to create harm. She doubted he had the kind of access to such information his employer was supposed to have, and today she doubted that that kind of insight was available even to her God.
“Yes,” she said, with a smile to Anna and a reminder to herself that she had in fact passed several pleasant hours in the girl’s company just two days prior. “Don’t mind me. I speak my mind, but I know when to ease up.”
The lunch was not an altogether unpleasant affair in the beginning. The priest led them to the usual taverna after sending a text message to his wife, a message that employed a liberal use of emojis to indicate—as she and only she would understand—that he was making the best of the situation and that the lovemaking they had been looking forward to would have to wait. His wife’s reply with the image of a clock and a dancing lady could easily have been construed as something innocent, were the priest’s phone to fall into someone else’s hands. When he told her this concern that evening as he stepped out of his briefs in their dark bedroom, she burst into muffled laughter and teased him for thinking like a spy. As they made love, her laughter bubbled up periodically and she agreed he would not want the phone to fall into enemy hands. Now as the group arrived at the taverna, he stuffed the phone deep into the pocket of his cassock to be certain no exposure would occur, and he resisted every impulse to retrieve the phone each time it buzzed with a notification until his wife arrived in person to join the meal.
Without the boys there, the conversation among the four adults took some time to become established. Freed from the interruptions of the boys’ chatter and their comings and goings from the table, the discussion faltered where it had room to flow. It was not until they had all completed the long process of ordering and not until the dishes had been described to Anna, who wished she knew the cost of each one so that she could order with modesty in case the priest was paying and with slightly less frugality in case she would be paying for herself—not until then did the priest’s wife, whose name was Nefeli, ask how Anna and Irini had become friends. Nefeli saw her choice of words had been a poor one as the older woman sat up in surprise and the younger reddened.
“Young Anna here brought me your figs,” Irini said. “She was the fig-bearer.” Anna smiled agreement, not certain whether this title came from an ancient statue she should know.
“The basket you wanted me to take to Irini,” the priest said to his wife. “I had an appointment to get to and Anna offered to help, so I sent her to Irini. And the rest is history.”
His final comment was unfortunate, for no one at the table, not even Father Emmanouil himself, knew what he meant by it. Who was he, Irini wondered, to make such a claim on her life and on her time? Who was he to make such assumptions of her personality, that he could introduce this girl who knew nothing and who worked for no money to Irini, who had attended the finest school for girls in all of Athens and who had been introduced to royalty, meeting Queen Friederiki not once but many times before the war? And besides, to say the rest was history was to imply a future and Irini’s future was already spoken for, no matter what she told her God in her defiance. Anna was no less bewildered by the priest’s statement but she was not displeased. To think of herself as already connected to this woman with the pixie cut and the trim skirt and the men’s watch that dangled from her wrist like jewelry was to consider herself one step closer to something important. She could not say what, exactly, but it was a corpus of understanding, of wisdom, that she knew she did not possess. She knew that she knew nothing. She knew that when she sat down beneath the birdcage by the espresso machine and laughed at slang she was only beginning to understand, she was approaching a life from which she was still off-center, peripheral. Her friends she met at the bar with the birdcage were no closer to that center than she was. They were all born after everything, and they complained of being reminded so by their grandmothers and great-aunts who lived with them in their parents’ houses. But because they were from here, even in their ignorance they had access to something Anna could not reach.
The only thing to do with a comment like the priest’s was to repeat it.
“Yes,” Irini said. “And the rest is history.”
Father Emmanouil tore a piece of bread from one of the pyramidal chunks in a plastic basket on the table and chewed energetically while he thought of what next to say.
“Irini, as you know,” he said, when he was finished, “has been a congregant since long before I arrived.”
“You are my fourth priest,” she said, “and the youngest by a great deal.”
“It’s good,” said Nefeli, “to have youth in the priesthood. I’m sure it’s part of what appealed to you, Anna, isn’t it?”
Irini did not think Nefeli should be asking Anna or any woman Anna’s age what about her husband was appealing. The man did not simply kick the soccer ball with his two boys. He played on Wednesday evenings in a clearing by the ancient Agora and, as she returned from her book club meetings past the broken columns and the open field beyond, Irini had seen the muscle definition of his chest and hips beneath his uniform. Anna had seen him too, Irini was certain, for once again the girl reddened, and this time the blush was not of delight but of embarrassment.
“What did bring you to the church, Anna,” Irini said. “I must know what brought you into our little world.”
The waiter arrived then with an arm cantilevered out to support the dishes: stuffed tomatoes for Nefeli and thus for Anna who had matched her order to that of the priest’s wife, pork chops for Irini, and giant beans in red sauce for the priest. A teenaged boy with his hair cut into a mohawk handed the waiter the rest of the order from a respectful distance: fried potatoes and a platter of dandelion greens dressed with oil and lemon, which the waiter added to the table. Without having to ask, he brought a large beer for Father Emmanouil and a small one for Irini, and a Coca Light for Nefeli. Anna contented herself with water, which she poured from a sweating glass pitcher. She could have answered Irini’s question by saying it was Oumer who had brought her to the church with the stubby nave. She had gone into a coffee shop near Monastiraki months ago and the barista, Oumer, had seen the cross on her necklace and struck up a conversation. Come on Sunday, he had said. The priest is good. And because Oumer was handsome and soft-spoken, she had gone. But Anna knew Irini was not concerned with the logistics of her arrival but with the very fact of her devotion.
“Why the church?” Irini said again, the interruption sharpening her question. “The young—pardon, Father—do not favor the church.”
It would have made for an interesting conversation had Anna known what to say in answer to the older woman, or rather had she been willing to say what she knew she felt. But she did not have the words. It was not a question of language, for she had had to defend against this accusation—what was it if not an accusation—one night at the birdcage bar, insisting to her friends that she was neither conservative nor boring. It was that she could not say it in front of the priest, could not tell him that she came to his church every week to make up for lost time. She came as a way of living like a woman of an older generation, or two, or three, a woman who knew what it was like to have been in the country all those years and seen things Anna could not even name for she was utterly ignorant of history. Irini had her four priests. Anna wanted at least this one priest as a guide to and through a life she should have known about, a life her grandparents might have lived in their village in Thrace, a life her parents would have lived had they not both departed Athens at the age of twenty-five.
There were no real events in the church, she knew that, not the way an election or a protest or a general strike were events—and she had witnessed all of those since coming to the city. But there were moments and actions that happened over and over, year after year, unchanging and endlessly repeating over centuries. These moments she prayed with and to. She told herself it didn’t really even matter that Father Emmanouil was Greek Orthodox. She would have gone to a synagogue or mosque had they been easier to find in Athens. Instead, she had come to this little church when she had first arrived in the city and had not yet learned that Plaka was where all tourists go, and she had followed the directions the barista Oumer had given her and crossed the little square to reach the church with the stubby nave. It had been January then and the tourists had been few, and she had glimpsed the version of the city that lay beneath all that, the city of heat lamps at the cafe and fireplace smoke hanging in the narrow streets and the rain-slicked squares where people stooped beneath the awnings of the kiosks to buy newspapers and magazines even though everybody had a smartphone.
If Anna was being honest, it did matter that Father Emmanouil was Greek Orthodox and not a rabbi or an imam, not a Buddhist or a Copt. It was her parents’ and her ancestors’ time she wished to connect to and if she was to find the timelessness through her religious activity, that activity would do well to be in the tradition in which her ancestors had existed. She liked to think of herself as advanced, as more open-minded than the Greeks of the city. When she met her friends beneath the birdcage, she sometimes challenged their proclamations about the Syrians. To them all refugees and immigrants, regardless whether they came from Iraq or Afghanistan or Syria itself, were Syrians, except the Albanians who were always Albanians and the Georgians who were always Georgians and who were frequently employed by their parents to care night and day for their grandparents. Everyone else, everyone who had dark skin—though what this meant was complicated, since most Greeks tanned very dark in summer—was Syrian. So, when Anna’s friends said something derogatory about all Syrians or expressed a condescending frustration in the guise of unbiased frankness, she challenged them to consider what they really meant. She offered her Ethiopian friends—she called them friends though they would in fact not call her the same—as examples of whatever point she needed to convey. They worked very hard, she said, without knowing if this was true, if she wished to counter an assertion of laziness. They were well-educated, if she wished to counter an alleged ignorance on the part of all refugees. That they were beautiful everyone agreed even without seeing them, though Anna knew that, even though she found Oumer particularly handsome, she should insist on some bit of ugliness in him in freedom from generalization.
“I don’t know how to explain it,” she said finally, and let her fellow diners think it was her Greek vocabulary that was lacking. “What does the church mean to you, Irini?”
“You can hardly ask me that in front of Father Emmanouil,” Irini said. “That’s like a new mother asking if her baby is ugly. Of course it is. All infants are. But you can’t say so to the mother’s face.”
“Are you saying you don’t like my services, Irini?” said the priest with a smile.
“Your services are fine. It’s your God I have problems with.”
“He’s not my God. He’s yours, Irini. He’s everyone’s.”
“Tell that to the Buddhists, Father,” Irini said.
“Or the atheists,” Anna said, sensing an opening.
But this annoyed Irini, when the young ceded authority only to suddenly claim it once their elders had cleared the path through a complex thicket of ideas. The girl needed to understand that it was easy to make identifications. It was much harder to express dissatisfaction without robbing it of meaning.
“God disappoints me, Father,” Irini said, “when he ignores me, even though I claim only an instant of his time. And what is time to him when he is part of eternity? Time matters to me because I have so little of it left. And that, young lady,” she said, turning to Anna, “is why I come to the church even though I have become an unsatisfied customer. I come back because I see my time diminishing and I am hoping to learn how to extend it.”
The girl leaned forward ever so slightly at this, and Irini feared she was about to opine again in the cocksure way of those whose opinions have been prepared for them. But the girl said nothing and Irini took a moment to consider what she herself had just said and whether she really did mean to extend her life. That was not it, and how, after all, could attendance at this church make any changes in biology, for Irini’s life had been mapped when she was born to parents of good health and freedom from ailments of the heart or tumor. She wished to deepen her life, not to extend it. Lately she had allowed herself to understand that what she really wished for her life was to repair it in the time that she had left. And she returned almost every Sunday to the church to see if she could find out how.
Irini cut into her chop and chewed the meat that was, as always, just a hair too cooked for her taste. But she would not complain about the doneness of the meat in a donated meal, and she could rest easy that she was still in possession of all her teeth and was not limited as were others of her generation. Even her husband had had to give up certain cuts of meat in his later years, prolonged malnutrition during the war having resulted in a weakness to his bones and teeth. His family had not been well-to-do like hers, and while she had passed the German occupation supplied with honey and cheeses and legs of lamb from farmers beholden to the family estate, her husband’s family had been among those to sell their lamb and honey for the funds with which to purchase firewood and olive oil and grain. In his later years, her husband had taken to risottos and pasta dishes or soft-cooked chicken in tomato sauce, most often cooked by the tavernas in the little square, as Irini was no more than an indifferent cook. When they dined out in the square, the waiters pretended that her husband’s were the more delicious choices. Irini never ordered those soft foods, not then, not with the priest’s family on Sundays, and not on the rare occasions when she sometimes convinced a friend from the book group to treat her to a meal out. When she paid what was to her an exorbitant amount to go to the cinema on the rooftop, before the cold weather drove the operation to the indoor auditorium, she made the most of the rare expense and bought a paper cone of toasted melon seeds and she could crack them without fear between her teeth.
“Irini,” Nefeli said, “I think you already know the secret to extending time. I don’t know any other woman like you in all of Plaka.”
“All of Plaka,” Irini said. Plaka was a tiny area bounded by the Acropolis on one side and by formerly grand boulevards of the nineteenth century on the others. With so many of the old houses now converted to hotels or shops or razed to make way for office buildings, there were hardly many women in Plaka with whom Irini could compete. But she allowed Nefeli her compliment. She had been impressed upon first meeting the priest’s wife to see how fashionable she was—dressing in blocks of color and clean lines that reminded Irini of Jean Seberg. Nefeli, long accustomed to the effect she made and adept in detecting the reaction in people’s eyes, had told her that just because she’d fallen in love with a priest, that didn’t make her stodgy.
“Seems to me,” Nefeli went on, “you don’t need the church to work your personal miracle.”
“Nefeli Bourdzis,” Irini said, “that sounds like blasphemy. Watch your wife, Father.”
Nefeli shrugged dramatically—she had given up dreams of a stage career—and reached across her husband’s plate for a toothpick. The priest and his wife and the young girl Anna continued to look at Irini, Nefeli doing so with one hand covering her mouth while the other held the toothpick with which she tidied her teeth after partaking of the dandelion greens. But Irini had nothing more to say on the subject of her relationship with the church, nor did Anna have any more to add on the subject, as she was, on this topic, too, ignorant.
Irini cut another piece of pork, delicately slicing it away from the bone. She had been taught well as a little girl barely able to grip the handles of her knife and fork, and she adhered to a list of foods one was permitted to touch with one’s fingers—among them a fruit such as the figs Anna had brought two days ago—and the list was very short. Even at Piraeus harbor waiting for the boat to cross to the island of Hydra with her husband, she ate the skewered souvlaki meat—this fare of ship embarkations in all Greek ports was on her list—without daubing her chin with grease. She never lost the accompanying napkin to the sea breeze before using it to clean her fingers.
“When was your first priest?” Anna said.
Irini paused in her slicing upon realizing the question was addressed to her.
“Pardon?” she said.
“You said Father Emmanouil was your fourth priest. When did you start?”
If the girl sought a long history of Irini’s life in the church with the stubby nave, she would be disappointed. For the priests who came to Plaka never lasted more than four or five years in the posting. The second priest had wanted to be closer to what he felt was a truer Greece, freer from tourists, and the first had fled a Plaka still emerging from its time as the neighborhood for bars specializing in loud music played on old Greek instruments but favored by the nouveau riche. She and her husband would have liked to have fled in those years, but this was well before the earthquake that had so damaged the family home, and they felt they had an unspoiled asset whose value was artificially depressed by the sordid nature of the neighborhood and sure to rise. So, they had waited for Plaka to change—which it had—but the first of Irini’s priests had not been interested in waiting and he had accepted a post somewhere in Thessaly. The third priest had had an affair with the wife of the owner of the rooftop cinema and had been so badly beaten by the husband, who had wept pleas for forgiveness with each blow he struck, that he had given up the post before the church authorities had time to kick him out. Now that Irini lived within sight of the cinema, she often saw the husband and the wife, still married, pulling down the grilles over the door and the ticket window at night in twin moods of grim resignation. It was said that because the cuckolder had been a man of the cloth, the cuckold and his wife must not compound the sin by divorcing, and so they remained together while their adult son shook his head in bewilderment. Irini told Anna none of this.
“The year two thousand,” she said.
“That’s eighteen years ago,” Anna said. She looked at Father Emmanouil as if to confirm her calculation.
“Yes, it is,” Irini said.
She broke off a small chunk of bread and swiped it over her plate to catch the juices from her chop. It was in part because of the coming of the new millennium and in part because of the earthquake of the previous year that she had begun to attend services at the little church. She did not like to admit this, and in a way it was her good fortune that long gone was the priest who had first heard her observations that the turn of a new millennium of Christianity could be a propitious time to assess what the whole church project had to offer. The symbolism of the enterprise had seemed appealing to Irini then, a new millennium beginning merely months after Athens had been cracked open, and a new exploration for her to undertake. It had not been lost on her that the change of the calendar that year would mean something even more. And it was not lost on her—though she wished she could consign this fact to oblivion—that her own life had cracked open with the earthquake that year and that she too could benefit from a new beginning.
She had been sixty-three and her husband sixty-five and their daughter had been already thirty-five and pregnant with many miscarriages behind her. Secretly Irini had made a vow to herself that if she began to attend church services, her daughter would have her child in the new year and Irini’s line, her heritage, and her family genes, if not her name, would go on. That had been her first prayer ever, and her God of those years had answered it. Not without exacting payment in return. They had been just getting to know each other then, Irini and her God. If only he were as prompt now. She had begun to go to the church with the first priest in January of that millennium year, and by Lent she was forced to admit to herself that she was at the church to learn about eternity. She had by then accrued a debt that might require eternity to repay.
“We never went to church in the States,” Anna said, “with my parents. I’m sorry, Father E.” Conveniently, Anna’s abbreviation made the same sound as the first syllable of his name.
“Don’t be sorry, Anna,” the priest said, and he raised his arm in what almost looked like a benediction but was a call to the waiter to come and take his cash. “You’re here now.”
“Yes, and I’m so glad. It means a lot to me. And now,” she set a hand on Irini’s arm, “I’ve met you.”
Irini tried to conceal her flinch from the girl’s touch, but everyone at the table saw it. Even the boy with the mohawk who assisted the main waiter at the restaurant caught the snap of movement at the priest’s table. He glanced over his shoulder at the table one more time as he brought soiled dishes to the kitchen and, tripping over an uneven flagstone in the square, sent the dishes smashing. Now it was the priest’s table that glanced in the direction of the boy and his commotion.
“There go his tips for the day,” Irini said. “Poor boy.”
But she was thinking of her good fortune that the boy’s stumble gave her and the priest and his wife something else to discuss besides her shock at Anna’s excessive enthusiasm for having met her. Not that enthusiasm in itself was to be frowned upon. This was a culture and a country in which speech was accompanied by vivid gestures, sweeping or staccato, and where the tones of even casual conversation were regularly mistaken by tourists for heated arguments. It was not the enthusiasm in itself that posed a problem now. It was Anna’s extension of her hand onto Irini’s arm in a way that had been ever so slightly condescending, ever so slightly suggesting something of infirmity in the older woman and charity in the younger. They had all seen it—except Anna who had seen only that Irini had twitched away, and whose attitude of condescension or charity had been purely accidental.
“Poor kid is right,” Nefeli said. “And that woman who got splashed by it,” she went on. “Look.”
Anna followed Nefeli’s gaze and Irini met the priest’s eyes with a silent message. Do not thrust upon me this young woman with her overexcitement at our meeting.
“Anna,” the priest said, “you must have waited tables in America. Most young people do, don’t they?”
Father Emmanouil liked to maintain his connection to the experiences of youth—his own and others’—which he felt were not so far behind him.
“For summers, a little. But what I mean,” Anna said, turning to Irini again but this time refraining from a gesture, “is that I love coming to services, but it’s just nice to meet someone from the neighborhood. To make a friend.”
“We are your friends, Anna,” Nefeli said, and the girl nodded with silent vigor. Irini thought she saw her eyes begin to well up and she caught herself from scolding her. There was a difference, in Irini’s mind, between expressing one’s emotions and losing control of them.
“Surely you have friends your own age already,” she said. “You’ve been in Athens several months. Isn’t that what you told me?”
“I do. No. Of course I do.”
Anna picked at the crust of bread beside her plate. Here was a new source of embarrassment for them all at the thought they had exposed the young woman to be friendless and lonely. It occurred to Irini then that for the girl to be attending the liturgy at ten thirty on a Sunday morning, she could not be staying out late on a Saturday night, unless she came to church straight from the clubs. Irini looked at her closely now—yes, those were tears in the girl’s eyes—and saw clean hair and a fresh face with only the light makeup of the daytime. No, the girl had come from home.
“Where is your neighborhood?” Irini asked. When the girl had brought the figs, she had explained that the little church in Plaka was convenient to an apartment she rented on the north side of the Acropolis hill.
“Well, not exactly Plaka,” Anna said. “I couldn’t find anything I could afford.” Her face reddened with impressive speed. “I mean,” she said, but stopped.
“It’s all Airbnbs now, isn’t it?” Nefeli said.
“I wanted something more—” Anna hesitated. She had already overstepped some boundary with the old woman and now she had raised the possible shame of the charity the woman received from the church, as if Anna were suggesting she too should be eligible, when her own tight finances were the product of her youthful choice and not a final condition.
“Something more authentic,” Irini said.
“Yes.”
“And where did you find it?”
“Anafiotika.”
Irini sputtered a laugh at the name of the latest trendy district of the city.
“Why?” Anna said. “What is it?”
Irini took her in once more. The girl was having a worse morning even than the boy who had destroyed his pile of plates. She was creating embarrassment left and right and nearly drowning beneath the waves of it that crashed back upon her. She had a nice face. Round, with a slightly upturned nose, and dark eyebrows she plucked artfully. She seemed to have no guile and no agenda. She had brought Irini the figs and she had listened to her stories of the war for hours. Irini wondered what more the girl might bring her in future visits, but the overeagerness of Anna’s innocence was almost great enough to strip the thought of all potential interest.
“Anafiotika is nice,” Irini said. “It is, however, not very authentic. The families from the island of Anafi who first settled there and gave it its name have mostly moved away. It’s full of new people now, and most of them run Airbnbs.”
“But I’m renting from one of those Anafi families,” Anna said.
“Well, good for you. But Anafiotika was never authentic in the first place.”
“Irini, that’s not fair,” Nefeli said.
“Of course, it is. It’s true. When the first people came, they made a pretend island village in the middle of Athens. It was never real.”
“They missed their home island and they wanted to recreate it. There is nothing wrong with that.”
“What they built has nothing to do with the place they came to.”
“We all suffer from nostalgia,” Father Emmanouil said. “The Anafi islanders simply expressed their sorrow in their buildings.”
“Not everyone could have had a grand house like yours, Irini,” Nefeli said. “Some of us aren’t even from here. And I’m not even talking about Oumer and Tamrat, bless them. Father and I are from Thebes. Surely that doesn’t mean we need to go away.”
“No. I never said it did,” Irini said and sat back from the table. She glanced out for the waiter in hopes that she could signal to him as the priest did, to bring the check for the priest’s payment. She was growing frustrated now with this Sunday lunch she had not even wished to attend, except for the economy it would allow her and the additional ice cream she would be able to buy from the kiosk. She was trying to be nice to the girl and now Nefeli was adopting the wise kindness of the priest’s wife. Irini had reached a point in her life when certain utterances should drive directly to their meaning and every meaning should be instantly understood. She did not have the time for other people’s detours and digressions. When she sat in her little living room with the Proust on her lap and the French-Greek dictionary on the small table beside her, she often cursed the man’s unwillingness to come directly to the point. It was as if he were some kind of self-appointed Scheherazade and must unwind his story in the longest possible way lest his life end in time with the telling. Which was not a bad strategy—though Proust had failed at it by dying before his book was finished. But why should Irini have to take the rest of her life to read about his?
“You are, of course, right, Nefeli,” she said, and she looked at each of them in turn. Anna, Father Emmanouil, his wife. “And doesn’t the church and our own tradition as Hellenes teach us to welcome the stranger?” She waited a moment. “I just wish the stranger had better taste in architecture.”
She smiled to show that she was making a joke and the smile and the laughter of the others released them all from the tight bounds of the conversation, and Father Emmanouil signaled to the waiter who stood ready with the check because he too had sensed their need for freedom and wished also to seat another party in their place. With the boys absent, there would be no dance of pastry offers to extend the meal today. They pushed back their chairs and rose.
“I’d love to see your family home sometime,” Anna said, as they paused before departing.
“It’s not far from here,” the priest said.
“Anyone can see it anytime,” Irini said. “You don’t need me to take you.”
The goodwill of the meal’s end vanished beneath Irini’s brusqueness. Father Emmanouil could not understand the woman’s determination to be unkind today. He prided himself on remembering details about the previous lives of his few parishioners but summoned up no information to explain Irini’s mood. Was it a tragic anniversary? Was it the remembrance of an important date in the city’s history? The crushing of the student uprising: November. The street battles at the end of one war and the start of the next: December. The German invasion: April. The end of the military junta: July. There was nothing in August to mar the mood of an Athenian save the searing heat to be experienced by those who had not traveled to the islands to escape.
“The good news is that the house isn’t going anywhere,” he said. But it was clear to everyone this was a foolish assertion, considering the city’s and the house’s own history of upheaval. “You have all the time in the world to go see it, and I’m sure Irini will be glad to show it to you.” He looped his arm through Nefeli’s. “I will see you both at service next week,” he said, “if not before.”
Nefeli kissed Anna on both cheeks and watched the girl step backward to avoid the delicacy of having to kiss Irini the same way as custom would allow. Anna had learned her lesson, though it would be only five days before she touched the old woman again. Now she waved a hand and made her way across the square so that she could skirt the base of the Acropolis. When she had first come to the city, she had raised a gale of laughter at her first departure from the bar with the birdcage over the espresso machine. Her friends had explained that it was rude to show the flattened palm and had taught her to wave in a one-handed clapping gesture bringing her fingers to her palm. Now when she reached the corner by the entrance to the rooftop cinema, she turned to see if the other three were still there. They were and they were watching her. She raised her hand and made the clapping shape, a gesture that reminded Anna of a baby’s greeting, hoping they would see her through the branches of the mulberry trees.
“If you want her to see my house so much,” Irini said, “you show it to her. I’m busy.”
“Always?”
“Always.”
“Except when you come to church.”
“Whether or not I come to church is my business.”
“Actually, it’s very much mine. It’s my only business, Irini.”
He laughed, but there was nothing humorous about this situation, in Irini’s eyes.
“You’re matchmaking, Father.” He gave a look of dramatic indignation. “Yes, you are,” she continued.
“I’m doing no such thing.”
“She’s a nice girl,” Nefeli said. “She only wants to be helpful.”
“Nobody her age just wants to be helpful,” Irini said, but this was more true of her own age than of Anna’s. Irini moved away as if to leave, but she had more to say. “You two have decided I need watching. That’s it, isn’t it? And I don’t. What about me makes you think I need a young person to check in on me?”
The priest and his wife had not rehearsed this conversation—though Nefeli had played her part in feigning ignorance of how the two women had come together. But they had ample practice in convincing their parents to do what they thought best, the latest success being to cast a weekend with the grandsons as rejuvenating to the older couple. Father Emmanouil stepped forward now while Nefeli receded.
“You’ve said your hip is bothering you,” he said.
“I told you that was what I was hoping God would help me fix. Or help me find the patience for. Or the money. But that doesn’t mean she’s going to do anything about it.”
Again, Irini began to walk away.
“But—” Nefeli took Irini’s arm, knowing that her touch had been earned and would face no ill consequences. “It will be nice for you to spend time with someone from a younger generation.”
“Why? Why do you both think I must spend time in the company of someone younger than myself? I have my friends. I have my chats with you two. If I am to add another person to my social circle, it will be because I chose her.”
“Why not spend a little time with the girl?” Nefeli said, as if Irini had not spoken.
It was at this moment that Irini realized it was not for her benefit that the priest had brought her and the girl together, but for the girl’s. She felt a flush of satisfaction, to be singled out with this sort of importance, and to see that she could move now by invitation. But Nefeli mistook the resultant smile on Irini’s face for the older woman’s affection for the girl and she pulled Irini into an embrace.
“I knew you were too kind at heart to resist,” she said. “You’ll do it, then?”
“Nefeli, no.”
“She’ll do it, Father,” Nefeli said.
With her back turned to Irini she made large eyes at her husband, signaling to him to go along. They would produce enough enthusiasm to sweep Irini up into their idea, and by the time Irini realized she had become fast friends with this girl more than fifty years her junior, it would be too late for her to extricate herself. Nefeli had been on the beach at Kineta one day when a little boy on an inflatable Mickey Mouse had drifted far offshore. Pregnant with their first son, she had been terrified to see the rescued boy, himself terrified and unmoving in the arms of the water-ski boater who had returned him to his wailing mother. The sight of him returned to safety had called up every possibility for how he might have perished. Anna was hardly young enough to be Nefeli’s child—twenty-seven years old to Nefeli’s thirty-two—but she was someone’s child, alone in a large and chaotic city and without the carapace of cool to protect her. The girl wanted so much. This had been clear to Nefeli and to the priest who had seen right away when Anna had lingered in the tiny courtyard before the church that she was charged with yearning. For what had not been clear. Nefeli had maintained to her husband that the girl was not devout, but he had not seemed to mind, preferring any body in the congregation to no congregation at all. Nefeli had felt this was perhaps a kind of cheating, to embrace someone who might want no more from the church than an embrace. This is the whole point, the priest had reminded her. To embrace even those who are unsure.
“Excellent,” he said now.
“No,” Irini said. “I will not do it.” She stepped away from the two of them who stood beaming at her. “I have my life set the way I like it and I am too busy to play babysitter to this girl.”
Something changed in Nefeli’s face at that moment that Irini could not read but that she hoped meant a casting off of this enthusiasm she found so tiring. She should have simply walked away, having won the argument, but—for all her quarrels with this lazy God—she could not turn her back on a priest.
“What?” Irini said.
“She told me about the figs.”
“What figs?” Irini knew exactly what figs, as she had craved more when those were done and had not found any ripe ones in the market on Saturday.
“She told me how she was going to drop them off and leave to meet her friends but you served her tea and made her eat with you.”
“I never made her do anything.”
“In a good way,” Nefeli said. “And she enjoyed your stories so much that she changed all her evening plans, just to stay.”
“So, you see, Irini,” said the priest. “It seems you might have liked talking to her after all. Just a little bit.” He held up two fingers to show her exactly how little. It was an ecclesiastical gesture—to bring the fingers together like a trinity to make the sign of the cross—and it made the priest look slightly awkward now to be using it by habit in his joke. He was not in his element. That was why he had let his wife persist in this social maneuvering. Irini was in her element. She stood in the same street she had been pushed down in an infant carriage, or had walked or run or strolled on for eighty-two years. The reason she never stumbled in the streets of Plaka even in her heels was that she had been walking every meter of them since she knew how to walk. She sometimes wondered if she could walk outside the confines of the city’s oldest quarters, beyond the Plaka and the Acropolis and the footworn marble of the ancient theater. She had not left Athens since her husband’s death. Plaka was her element, and Father Emmanouil and his wife were from Thebes and had come to Athens only lately. She had every reason to shape her own life as she wanted and to be unmoved by any pressures coming at her from inside or out.
“I will be at church next Sunday, Father. Nefeli, give my love to the boys when their grandparents return them.”
“Irini, wait.”
“There’s no need to apologize,” she said. “I know you mean well.” She found this a useful way to remind the unapologetic that they were in your debt. She walked off toward the little square and realized that she was trembling, not with weakness but excitement. If her God would not listen to her, at least she had the priest and his wife in her control.
She waited until they would be gone from the little square before going to the kiosk to purchase her Magnum ice cream. She stood in the shade of the kiosk awning around the back where the owner kept a pink plastic chair for when he had no business. She peeled the wrapper off, racing to eat the ice cream before the chocolate coating melted. This was a far better product than the ice creams of her youth and of her daughter’s youth, tangy from goats’ milk and coarse with crystals of ice. If she abstained from the rooftop cinema this week, she would purchase another of these ice creams before next Sunday.
In August the city gave itself over to the disconnected, those who, because of a deliberate or unwanted rootlessness, broke off from the customs and patterns of the country and did not flee the city on holiday. These people remained in what felt like an evacuated place in a time of conflict. They rejoiced in the emptiness, but they despaired of it too. There was much that they could not accomplish in these evacuated days—dry cleaning, a shoeshine, the signing of a contract—but there was much they could achieve only with the city in its lassitude. It was possible in August for those with money to spend to find a table at a restaurant even at the coveted time of ten o’clock when most Athenians began to consider dining out. It was possible for those without money to sit in a park and stretch their legs out. It was possible for everyone to cross the boulevards that framed the edges of Syntagma Square without nearly being felled by a speeding motorbike. Nevertheless, in August, Athens was hot. The heat switched on with the first direct strike of sunrise and flattened the city with a blinding white light.
If Anna had told her parents she had offered to keep the art gallery open during August on behalf of her employer, they would have explained. They would have told her the gallery owner surely would not be bothered by closing the place for the month, as most of his clients would be at resorts in the Dodecanese or the Croatian coast. The backpackers and foreign families who toured the Acropolis en route to Mykonos or Santorini were not his clientele. Anna’s parents had grown up in an eastern section of the city and had been identically rushed off, as if to safety, to spend the month in beach towns where their grandparents could watch them play in the sand from their hotel balconies. Sometimes the sameness of her parents’ lives before they left Greece bothered Anna, for she suspected them of covering over childhood hardship and arriving at identical fictions. They were not siblings, after all, but boyfriend and girlfriend and then husband and wife. How could their upbringings have been so similar? What Anna did not understand was that class determined everything in Greece and that the patterns of behavior were long established within each class. It was as determined that her parents were going to go from childhoods in Chalandri to summers in Kalamata as it was set that they would emigrate specifically to Astoria when they were twenty-five.
But Anna had said nothing to her parents during any of their Sunday Skype calls about her August plans, and when they had asked her in late July where she was going to flee to, she had explained that she was staying. Her parents had expected her back in the States long before this point, as the term of her internship had come to an end in March. Whenever they imagined her in her extended time in the city, they assumed that she had found that loveliest of Greek things that they had never been able to replicate in Astoria: the parea, the group of friends. They assumed their daughter had been held in Athens in the arms of her parea, staying out late on weekends, spending long afternoons at one of the beaches in Glyfada or Lagonisi. They had assumed she would go with her parea to one island or another for the month of August. Anna explained that she did have a parea—and she did; she was not lying about this—but that she wanted to see what the city would be like when all the noise fell away. She knew her parents had left not for a month but forever because they had wanted to be able to afford such comings and goings for the rest of their lives. Her parents would have been deeply saddened and embarrassed too to think of their daughter remaining behind with, as they would have put it, the poor. So, Anna had cast all this as a desire for quiet, letting them picture her strolling easily through Kolonaki and onward to the smaller of Athens’ hills that rose up to face the Acropolis. From there, she would relax and catch the breeze drifting toward the Aegean between the twin ranges of Hymettos and Parnitha. As if in demonstration of an allegory, the city was framed by a monastery on one side and a casino on the other.
Anna had a parea. This was true. She was not always sure that her parea had her, for she knew that she remained peripheral to them. They got together, for instance, in smaller groups that she was not part of, and they had a history of many years together as teenagers from the same school, meeting others in art school, and adding family friends and cousins over the years. They had swept her up among them a bit as a curiosity, pulling her in as the new assistant in the gallery where another of them had once worked, and who already spoke excellent Greek and had the coloring and eyebrows to look it but who was also clearly foreign. They had encouraged Anna in the change from her all-black outfits to the high-tops and tanks she wore now. But they resisted changing her over completely, as they liked the tiny differences that set her apart when more intimate and personal aspects of the parea were being discussed. This August, Anna’s parea announced they had decided to go camping, which meant setting up tents beneath sharp-needled evergreens along the west coast of the country where the beaches were wild and pebbled and the water of the Ionian was azure and clear. They would go for the second half of the month, and Anna had said that she would join for a few days if the gallery owner could be persuaded to close. She had not asked him yet and was unlikely to do so, as she was afraid to interrupt his holiday with her phone call and imagined his displeasure at being pulled away from a cocktail or a dive off a yacht or worse. Worst of all was the possibility that the gallery owner would grant permission and she would travel to the coast to find her parea awkwardly surprised to see her.
When Anna had told Father Emmanouil about her intention to stay in the city all of August, he had insisted that she leave. Nefeli had nearly pushed her onto a boat—go at least to Hydra for a few days—and professed herself ready to drive her to the campground on the western coast when the time came. Instead, the priest and his wife did the next best thing. They brought her together with Irini. There had been a time in Irini’s life when she would have been shocked, insulted even, to think that she would stay in Athens during August. She had spent her childhood Augusts on the island of Siros, paddling in rocky pools and dropping sea urchins into a bucket, and riding her bicycle past neoclassical harbor houses not unlike the family home in Plaka. Her mother had had a nanny for her then, so that the little girl Irini could play safely while her mother and grandmother drank tea or lemonade beneath the portico that fronted the embankment. Then with her husband, Irini had brought their daughter for years to the same house on the same island, venturing to Nafplion one summer only and to Kerkyra another before realizing that no matter where they went, they always stayed in the same kinds of places with the same kinds of house. Not for them, the low, whitewashed structures of the Cyclades where the tourists thought they found something echt Greek. They preferred high-ceilinged neoclassical buildings just like their home in Plaka, built on islands by the wealthy to be occupied by the wealthy on vacation.
Then Irini had stopped being wealthy. Not all at once but slowly. First there had been the never-explained cut to her husband’s pension, and then there had been his refusal to budget to this new reality, and then there had been the dispute with Irini’s brother and sister over the house on Siros, which she lost, and then the earthquake in Athens that had caused so much damage to the house that had been given outright to Irini as her only financial stake. And then their move to a small apartment, and then the husband’s sudden death, and drastic reductions to the widow’s pension she had inherited, now explained—the economic crisis and austerity. From there it had been onward to various liabilities of the old house—liabilities of more than an economic nature—and Irini was no longer wealthy. She was, if she admitted it, almost a ward of the State—though, as she thought of it, weren’t they all. Her medical costs were paid for by the State, her Metro pass, her entrance to museums, all paid for by the State. If that was all she ever wanted to do—not read or eat well or see movies or buy clothes—she might survive. This was another thing Irini liked about the Church, besides the charity of her free rent: the Church had money, lots of it, and being inside even the little church with the stubby nave made them all feel like kings and queens, surrounded by gold and silver. This was probably not a thought Father Emmanouil should ever hear, preferring as he did to emphasize the shared humility of the congregation before God—whose palace, after all, this was—but it afforded Irini some satisfaction.
Now it was August 2 and anyone regularly attending church and even many who did not would begin a mental preparation for the Assumption on the 15th. Some would even fast in the days leading up to the holiday, as the priest had exemplified with his lunch of giant beans in red sauce. To prepare his congregation beyond their dining choices, Father Emmanouil liked to give out small sheets of photocopied paper to his congregants with a list of Bible passages to read in order to bring the mind and soul in line with this great event of Mary’s ascension into the heavens. He had made the mistake a few years ago of marking the sheets with the specific date and so every year since then he handed out these photocopied instructions that, though they were supposed to pertain to something eternal, reminded everyone of how much time had passed. Nefeli tried to convince him to recycle these pages and print new ones without a date at all, but he believed the most environmentally friendly practice was not recycling but reusing. So, as Irini sat in her little living room with her morning coffee and the Bible, she consulted a reading list of Biblical passages dated from four years prior. She tried to remember what she had been doing four Augusts ago, and realized it was the same. How could it not have been? Four years ago she was in Plaka, as always, living in this little apartment, and she had had her book club and her cinema to round out her days. They had been reading Moby Dick then and it had been a failure, the arcane English words of whaling and seamanship nearly lost to the translator in the Greek. There was a small measure of delight for her then in being newly resident in the little apartment with its grand view of the Acropolis. She had left herself no place else to go then—and still now—and the charity of the apartment had been rescue and relief from mounting rent bills and the need to layer sweaters and blankets on a raw winter day to save the cost of heat.
Now, as soon as Irini took up the photocopy and the Bible, she set them down again. For one thing, the paper was that sort of photocopy that glistens like a dolphin skin and curls and grays slightly at the edges, and something about it this morning made Irini shudder at the touch. For another, she was bored. Or, rather, she was reminded to be bored. Four Augusts in a row had found her doing the same thing, in the middle of a life of the same things, in the same place. If repetition was the hallmark of eternity, it now occurred to her she might want nothing to do with an afterlife. Could she not extend her life itself in some way that made it interesting? She was struck suddenly with the desire for variation, though she was a woman who shook her head at change whenever she encountered it. She wanted the world unchanged—a time when Plaka’s neoclassical houses contained families with servants and when the grandest buildings were schools and concert halls, not electronics stores—but she wanted to move through it. She wanted to do things, and something about the slick feel of the priest’s old photocopies gave her a sense almost of horror—horror for days wasted, for opportunities missed, for days adding up toward her final limit when instead she should be pushing and stretching them away and apart. More than the electric bill—which was not at all insignificant—she had debts and she could not be wasting time to settle them.
She finished her coffee quickly, with her eyes on the Acropolis to watch the Greek flag hoisted up the flagpole for the day. She vaguely remembered the day the Nazi flag had gone up in its place—she told people she had actually seen it though she had not—and the day a few weeks later when the two teenagers from her neighborhood—the parents of one of the boys were acquaintances of Irini’s own—had slipped past the German soldiers to raise the Greek flag once again. This Greek flag the Acropolis was using now replaced an older pennant that had faded with the sun, and it was vivid in that particular blue of a proper Greek flag. Not royal blue and not the turquoise shade that disgusted her when she saw it replicated in the flag images on hundreds of refrigerator magnets and T-shirts for sale along the streets of Plaka. This was a proper deep electric blue, suggestive of the blue of the Aegean, and if they were raising it now, the time must be nine o’clock. When she checked her husband’s wristwatch, she saw it was ten past the hour. She rose to fill the day, while wishing not to look too closely at how little she had with which to fill it.
Irini made her usual circuit through the shops in Plaka but then stretched her loop toward the garden of the Zappeio, which required the crossing of one of the major boulevards, already in its August state of near desertion. Little was altered there since Irini’s childhood. In its institutional locations, Athens retained a constancy it lacked utterly everywhere else. The essentials of a park or monument—packed paths of sand or gravel, a low cement curb, the dust-covered leaves of prickly hedges and swaying cypresses, even the particular maroon paint with which to mark a garden feature—these were all identical now to the days when Irini’s nanny, a stalwart woman from Epirus in the north with blonde hair and pale eyes, had straightened her pinafore whenever she ran back from skipping rope.
She knew exactly where to go, what route to take through the garden’s winding paths in order to avoid the dead end of the Prime Ministerial palace and circle back to the same boulevard as before, now at the entrance to the city’s central square. Here, there was change. The concert hall was now a Public selling laptops and books and smartphones, and the building beside it, once equally grand, was gone entirely, replaced by an atrocity in glass and metal. The square itself was equipped with benches she knew to be designed for crowd control, bolted into the marble paving so as not to be used as weapons in the frequent demonstrations that occurred there. The cafés that once ringed the square and set up tables in the center were now prohibited from doing so lest their furniture become projectile. The regulations had not prevented the protesters—from the left or the right, it didn’t matter—from prying up marble tiles from the square and its stairways. So, as she descended into the square now from the boulevard, she saw patches of bare cement and grout where marble had once been.
There were refugees camped in the square, and the scope of them was new to Athens in the last few years. There had, of course, always been some refugees in the city. Islanders from Naxos and Anafi who had claimed entire neighborhoods as their own, Greeks who had fled Asia Minor in 1922, Albanians who had poured across the border as soon as it opened to let them out of their prison country, and now the tens of thousands who came from Afghanistan and Syria and Pakistan and Iraq and Somalia, and immigrants like Oumer and Tamrat. Performing that error of well-meaning people everywhere, Irini scanned the square for the two Ethiopians, assuming that, as foreigners, they would be wherever there were any people like them. Oumer and Tamrat were not there but in an internet café a few streets to the west where Oumer was building a website for his planned Ethiopian-style coffee shop and Tamrat was checking his email for confirmation of a wire he had sent home to Addis Ababa.
Irini returned to Plaka by the pedestrian streets that had been created in a panic of shame at the city’s poor score in a test of hospitability to its inhabitants. It was the time of sales in all the shops, August being at once one of the holiest times in the religious calendar, the most popular vacation period, and the best time for the clearing out of merchandise. A low price on a skirt or blouse could be someone’s reward for enduring the city’s greatest heat. Irini dawdled before a few windows but the shops catered mostly to the young and to styles that she would never even want to wear, and the shops that did appeal to her were too expensive. She determined to wait until later in the month when the prices would drop further and when she would likely have been able to set aside more funds. She did her shopping at the little markets in the Plaka, gathering eggs and fruit and cheese and yogurt and a small collection of vegetables in her string bag. As always, she was praised and admired by the shopkeepers, and as always, she tipped her head in her gesture of mock royalty and offered some small compliment in return.
But she was back in the little square too soon and she had hardly done anything to break up the routine of her day except to visit the park she had known since childhood. The day was still far too young. The cafés still held their first wave of customers, the old men who gathered daily to discuss the newspaper. She had joined a group of them once, but from up close she had seen how old they really were, these widowers with no one home to correct them on their shaving or their laundry, and one of them had farted unapologetically while joking about the austerity measures and Irini had never returned again. She skirted the men’s café now and made for the other corner of the square to check the schedule for the rooftop cinema. Because it was August, the husband and wife who owned the cinema and had remained married despite the wife’s affair with Father Emmanouil’s predecessor indulged their son in his desire to screen European films to nearly empty seats. Attendance would be low in summer anyway, the young man reasoned, with natives mostly gone and tourists mistakenly preferring clubs and seaside bouzouki bars. So, the son chose to edify the few customers who persisted. This week and next he was screening a series of Truffaut films. Jules et Jim this evening. Irini had seen the film with her husband when it had first premiered. It had been just the two of them then, no child yet and no third person in the marriage. Irini had been twenty-seven and her husband twenty-nine and they had been married barely two years then—a little late in life for that, because the war had stretched the time for everything. They had not yet been past the high passions of their own romance, though Irini thought that neither Jules nor Jim nor this Catherine they were both besotted with need behave with such histrionics. She kept looking over at her husband in the dark—it was a winter screening and they were indoors in velvet seats—and delighting in his handsomeness in his turtleneck sweater and his sideburns. By any objective measure he had been a handsome man and Irini herself was a handsome woman. They had made a glamorous pair in those days, lounging over patisseries at Zonars or sharing drinks in the lobby of the Grande Bretagne.
Irini made a quick and unsettling calculation that she could forego something later in the week—she did not identify what, in the same failure to pin down the economics that had contributed to her husband’s mismanagement of their budget—and to that part of herself that knew better she insisted on the importance of the cinema to her cultural life and to the cultural life of Plaka. She could not imagine Plaka without the cinema, and she could not imagine the little square without its offered glimpses from below at night of the glow from the projection on the large blank wall of the adjacent building. She purchased one ticket for the early show at nine o’clock that evening. The son of the owners knew to assume that she had seen the film before and knew to express astonishment that she had already been married in 1963 when it had first screened in Greece. She could not possibly have even been born then, he exclaimed, and she gave that tip of the head and praised him for his good taste as a cineaste among the philistines of his generation.
It was barely lunchtime now—it was barely past morning—and she did not know how she would fill this day that suddenly seemed so stifling. No, that is not quite right. Irini knew exactly what would break her out of the pattern of her life. She turned her mind to frivolous options, to creature comforts that would delight and amuse. She could go to the new cultural center and stroll the olive grove that had been installed on a vast sloping plane rising to the arts complex itself. She could browse the books in the national library there and watch the sun set over Salamis from the rooftop pavilion. At sunset it was easy to see where the Athenian fleet had hidden behind the land mass of the island, lying in wait for the Persian ships lured into the strait. This was one of Irini’s favorite of Greek victories, the sneak attack, the deception that won out. However, like a true Greek, she admired the tragic losses almost as much, and Ephialtes’ betrayal at Thermopylae ranked with her among the finest tragedies of ancient times, with its cunning and improvisation, characteristics she saw around her in the city every day. She had made the trip to the cultural center soon after it had opened, along with seemingly everyone else in Athens, lining up in the city’s main square for one of the shuttle buses and riding in cramped delight down the boulevard to the coast. She had felt like a figure on an opera stage descending the long flight of stairs outside the giant building after ascending in an elevator made almost entirely of glass. The place had sung with a liveliness she had not seen in years. Children had ridden bicycles around the reflecting pool where sailboats—full sailboats!—zigged and zagged at the direction of the inexperienced, and couples had kissed by the olives, and entire families had leaned over the rail of the broad rooftop pavilion to gawk at the sea, the city, the Acropolis, the olive grove and the yoga classes and soccer matches and picnics below. If she could have gone there every day, she liked to think she would have. Or Irini could go to Hydra on the fast boat and reach its harbor town in time for lunch at the same taverna she and her husband had frequented in those summers when the Canadian was there writing his songs. He had been quite famous then and had become even more famous since, once his songs kept being redone in modern variations Irini found insipid.
Of course, she could do this—she could even fly to Paris or Milan, if she had the time and money. But she had lived too much time and possessed not enough money and not even the sharpness of her desire could balance the equation. And on top of all this, it was hot. She took her groceries up to the apartment and sat with her Proust and her French-Greek dictionary—though she hardly ever needed to consult it—and tried to concentrate on everywhere Marcel was going—which was difficult because he himself never went anywhere except in describing others—and not on everywhere that she was not.
If Irini had widened her walk that morning by even just a few more blocks, she would have seen Anna sitting at the counter of the café near Monastiraki where Oumer worked as a barista. Anna liked to stop there on her way to the gallery in Psirri and to chat with Oumer outside the confines of the church, and by now he knew her order and began preparing it as she arrived. A French coffee, which was what Greeks called the kind of simple coffee one had in America. She had been up late the night before sketching out a new project on a wall Oumer himself had told her about. In his parkour travels, he often spotted likely spaces for Anna’s graffiti writing, and she, in turn, was learning to recognize good routes for free-running in the staggered levels of the city’s buildings and park walls. Anna’s daily stops for coffee had become exchanges of information: routes for Oumer and concrete canvases for Anna.
Earlier that week he had told her about a good wall on the side of an empty lot in Metaxourgeio that was used during the day for parking. The wall had texture to it—the lower half being of amalgam and the upper covered in plaster.
“Did you check it?” Oumer said. She would have to act quickly, given the rarity of an unpainted surface in that neighborhood where some of the world’s best graffiti artists did their work.
“Yeah. Here.”
She tugged her sketchbook from her bag and opened it to the page where she had done a marker drawing of her idea. In fuchsia, blue, and yellow she had drawn a design that worked with the wall’s existing lines. Anna’s style—if she could be said to have one—was neither the angular energy of wildstyle nor the tongue-in-cheek lightness of bubble writing. Nor did she paint images that were beautiful in themselves and simply took the urban hardscape as their canvas. She worked, so far, with the lines of the wall or building as she found it. This was not a particularly inventive approach. In fact, it could be said that such obedience to the contours of the building was a sign of creative weakness. In Anna’s case, such an assertion would be correct. For, as avid as she was in her commitment to her art, Anna was only a middling artist and had, in fact, arrived in Athens not as a street artist but a collagist. Her creative output in college and the years after had consisted of cutting up images created by others and arranging them to her liking. Her liking tended toward the obvious: a stiletto overlapping a gun, a beach scene intercut with snow.
In Athens, she had made the friends who had in turn made her into a graffiti artist, plying her moderate ability and her willingness to venture to the empty lots and broken-down buildings of the city into murals they enjoyed. The walls of Athens were covered with art—or defiled, depending on one’s politics and taste. Along with the rampant emblems of a particular seating section of a particular soccer club, or the slogans of the far left or the far right, murals and tags covered nearly every available wall of the city. Visitors to Athens who marveled at the whiteness of the Parthenon’s marbles needed to look no further than the city’s graffitied walls to see what the ancient temple must have looked like in its time, painted in bright reds and golds and greens. Anna’s friends, who saw that her work was hardly better than what they themselves could make, nonetheless encouraged her. A few had become regular escorts for her painting sessions, holding the flashlight or scouting for police or property owners while Anna worked, and in this way they sometimes hid suggestions for improvement within their praise of her colors or her attitude.
Oumer swiveled the sketchbook on the counter for the right orientation.
“Cool,” he said. “I like the pink.”
Oumer was not a particularly keen judge of art, but this suited Anna better than a sharper critic who might have crushed her spirit. Anna was not a bad artist, but she was only average, and like many who do not rise above the middle of their craft, she could not see how far below the peak she stood. Which was, for Anna, just as well, for she rode the wave of her own enthusiasm into cheerful action and creation, instead of idling in the resignation that she would never measure up.
“Thanks, Oum,” Anna said. “I stayed up way too late to do it.”
She called Oumer by this nickname, though the abbreviation made as much linguistic sense as her shortening of the priest’s name to his first syllable. Oumer did not have the heart to correct her, though Tamrat raised his eyebrows at Anna—who did not notice—each time he heard the sound.
She asked Oumer for a refill and he obliged, pouring the second French coffee into a paper cup with a plastic lid so that she could take it with her to the gallery. This practice was hardly common except among foreigners and tourists, for most in the city knew that there was always a coffee shop nearby and it was still possible to summon a waiter from across the street to bring coffees to one’s office on a nickel-plated tray he swung from his hand like a giant censer.
Anna took her coffee from Monastiraki to the gallery in Psirri where no one came to look at the art, not a single person. She busied herself leafing through the art magazines the gallery owner used as decoration in the waiting area. There had been times when the gallery had been full enough for visitors to sit in the three beautiful but uncomfortable leather chairs and wait for space to clear in front of an intriguing work of art. In January, soon after she had arrived in Athens, they had had a show that had been quite successful, even garnering a review in the culture section of the center-left newspaper, and the gallery owner had been pleased enough to give Anna a tip simply for taking coats and handing out drinks and programs. But today she was the one who sat in one of the beautiful chairs and tried and failed to make herself comfortable.
In her bag from which she had pulled her sketchbook to show Oumer she had one of Father Emmanouil’s silvery photocopies and an English-language Bible. She wanted to make headway on the readings. This would be her first Assumption in Greece, not counting the summer she had been fourteen. But that year her relatives had simply taken her with them on the beach holiday where she had fallen from the Vespa and scarred her knee. Those cousins now were long gone from Anna’s and her family’s life, the younger generation having emigrated and the older having either died or returned to villages from which they ceased to keep in touch. Anna would be on her own for the Assumption, and she wanted to make the most of it, delving as deeply into the holiness of the time as she had delved into its secular version years ago. But she resisted her urge to pull the paper and the book out lest a customer arrive and find the gallery assistant engrossed in a religious text. She sensed it would not do to be revealed as a believer. She thought back to the lunch Father Emmanouil had hosted after church five days ago. She was no fool. She knew what had run beneath the conversation, sensed Nefeli’s worry about her, her defense of her, sensed the inexplicable—to Anna—disdain the older woman suddenly seemed to feel for her after having spent so many hours happily in her presence. Anna had told her friends how much she had liked this unusual old woman and now she wondered if their lack of interest in the old woman meant Irini was not unusual at all but a type, and her quick but fleeting embrace of their young friend was to be expected.
But still, Anna believed she had understood something correctly about the woman. Anna believed in many things. She believed in God, she believed in herself, and she believed today that she could befriend this old woman just as Nefeli and Father Emmanouil had intended her to do. And she believed that the old woman needed Anna’s friendship. The woman had no one—there was obviously a daughter but, save the photos of her and her son, there had been no sign of her, no note on the refrigerator, no jacket on the hook forgotten from another visit, no figs the daughter herself might have brought. Anna resolved to try again soon, and, because she had been thinking of Irini and because she was too tired from her late night to attend the party she was supposed to attend, and because in her fatigue she suddenly missed the consolations of a television and its ersatz peopling of one’s quiet space, on her way home at the end of the day, she stopped at the cinema in the little square and bought a ticket to the early show.
Neither woman saw the other at the cinema at first. This had to do in part with the dusk and in part with their different arrival times—Irini coming early so as to claim a favored seat among the folding deck chairs arranged in rows across the sloping roof, and Anna arriving late after a phone call with the friend whose party would occur later that evening and to which Anna had declared she was too tired to go. Irini stopped at the concession window at the high, rear end of the roof and purchased a small bag of passatempo, melon seeds roasted and salted so they could be cracked between the teeth. This had been her custom at the cinema for decades, as it was the custom of all Greeks, and she refused to adopt the American import of popped and buttered corn kernels. Anna bought a large bag of exactly this, surprised and delighted to encounter this reminder of home even in this place within sight of the Parthenon. For indeed the temple was on full view from the rooftop cinema. Irini had often registered her boredom with a film by simply turning to watch the lights play on the ancient stones instead.
Tonight, though, Irini was not bored. She slid down ever so slightly in the canvas sling of the deck chair and tilted her head back as if to be kissed. And as she watched the film’s opening scenes and saw again after a passage of five decades the ease of these young people in their talk of love and sex, she felt an almost amorous closeness to the woman she had been during that first viewing and to her husband as he had been then. In the film, the woman had two men—obviously the Jules and the Jim of the title—a situation that was just as complicated and dangerous in real life, Irini knew, as in the film. To Anna, the film was an artifact not unlike the psalms and icons of the church. This was life from before, a life her great-grandparents could have known, could have replicated in their own Greek way. Her great-grandparents had been far too conservative to have lived at all like this. But Anna pretended otherwise as she watched and let herself be carried back to a previous time as if it could be her own history.
To Anna’s surprise, there was an intermission, complete with a short, animated advertisement of dancing popcorn bags and cola bottles. When she turned to walk back up to the concession window for a Coca Light to slake her thirst after the popcorn, she saw Irini sitting in a chair on the aisle halfway up.
“Good evening,” Anna said, opting for this rather formal greeting. “I see we both had the same idea.”
“I never miss a chance to see Truffaut,” Irini said.
“I’m getting a Coke,” Anna said. “Can I get you something?” Anna chose her question carefully, selecting the Greek word that meant to offer rather than simply to bring, as she wished to make up for what she felt was the fiasco of their lunch together as the priest’s guests.
“No, but thank you.”
Irini reconsidered her reply, thinking that perhaps it would be a small kindness to allow the girl to treat her, and thinking, too, that she did not usually buy a beverage to go along with her melon seeds and so this treat would make a savings for her in the end. She began to speak just as Anna, of her own accord, turned back to Irini’s row.
“In fact,” Irini said, “they have a beer here that I like.”
“Beer!” Anna said. “That’s what I’ll get. One for you as well?”
“Thank you. That would be lovely. I prefer the Mythos.”
Earlier that day, in her restlessness, Irini had not gone to the new cultural center or to Hydra on the fast boat or to Paris or Milan, for these options were all equally fantastical given the state of her life and her finances. Instead, she had sat for hours reading the Proust and bits of the priest’s selections from the Bible. The bottle of Mythos beer would be her sole indulgence, besides the cinema, the sole thing that would serve as an exception to the pattern of her days. She determined not to allow the sadness of that fact to diminish her enjoyment. There was, however, one problem with the fact that she had accepted—invited, really—the girl’s offer of the beer: now the girl would have to linger and chat and it would be unspeakably rude of Irini not to make a more explicit invitation to the girl to join her. Her savings would not be without cost.
The cinema was practically empty. There was one middle-aged man sitting at the very front and four teenagers, two boys and two girls, who whispered and giggled at the back and paid no attention to the film. They had already completed the time-honored tradition of all teenagers in a Greek rooftop cinema, which was to roll their empty glass bottles of Fanta—guzzled just before the intermission—down the slope of the cinema roof so that the bottles trundled slowly and noisily but inexorably toward the edge of the raised platform at the front. Irini wondered why the owners of the cinema continued to order glass-bottled Fanta at all, considering that every night they had to sweep up the bottles and the occasional bits of glass if the Fanta rolled fast enough to break. The son of the owners had tried many times to discontinue the Fanta but his parents insisted, as they understood that the rolling of the bottles, more than the films themselves, was what compelled the teenagers to purchase tickets.
It was, then, in a virtually empty cinema that Anna returned with the beers, each one opened and topped with an inverted plastic cup, and made a little shuffle step to indicate she did not mind returning to her own seat. When Irini said, “Please. Join me, won’t you?” and waved a hand at the deck chair beside hers, the girl fought to conceal the extent of her delight. As Irini was on the aisle, Anna performed the dance of theaters everywhere, shimmying past and desperately hoping not to touch. She took her seat, and both women filled their cups from their respective bottles—Mythos for Irini and Amstel for Anna—and toasted each other with a muted clink of the edges of their plastic cups.
In the film’s second half, the situation of the lovers became dire, as each pull toward the one meant a rift with the other, and the connection between the two men remained a thing unspoken in 1962 when the film was made but palpable enough now to give the story a new meaning. There was a moment when the pain of it all for Jules and Jim and Catherine became so great that Anna and Irini both sighed and then turned to each other to agree that Jeanne Moreau was so good, and then they laughed at their identical reactions. Not much later, during a tender scene, one of the teenaged boys let out a belch—the product of the Fanta—and the middle-aged man in the front row jumped up—his silhouette entirely blocking the film that he was there to see and now defend—and shouted that he had had enough of their behavior and that they should go home and watch The Lion King. It was impossible not to find this funny and impossible not to support the teenagers as they ordered the man to sit down and stop blocking the program. During the next quiet moment in the film, one of the boys, the friend of the one who had belched, began to sing one of The Lion King songs in falsetto.
“That’s it, I’ve had it with you,” the middle-aged man said, and strode loudly up the aisle past Irini and Anna and continued straight out of the cinema altogether.
Not even Truffaut’s classic could compete that night for drama with what had occurred on the rooftop, so as the film wound to a close, Irini leaned toward Anna and whispered “Look.” They shifted in their deck chairs equally and evenly so that they spent the final moments of the screening watching not the conclusion of the doomed love triangle but the slow and stately rising of the August moon.
When the film was finished, Anna remained seated so that Irini could rise first, unhurried. The girl took her time descending the three flights of stairs to the lobby and from there out into the square, allowing the older woman’s pace—which was not slow but not especially speedy—to dictate their progress. Once in the square, the two women faced each other directly for the first time since the Sunday lunch, and in both women there was a new surprise at the recognition of something shared. The film had been new to Anna, though she had at least heard of Truffaut and had purchased her ticket in a belief in educating herself about the culture of her elders. Irini explained the story to her and explained, too, the film’s importance to the New Wave—for which she was obliged to provide a definition—and to Truffaut’s oeuvre. She pronounced the French word with an accent Anna could only assume was quite correct, and in this she was right, for this was the same accent that led French tourists to respond to Irini with such respect. Because Anna did not speak French, she had been forced to read the subtitles, and her ability to read the Greek, especially when the letters blended into the background image, was not adept enough for her to keep up with the story. She had misunderstood certain crucial moments, it became apparent, and now Irini offered her some clarification. As she explained the meaning of one particular dialogue, the women drifted away from the cinema and found seats almost without realizing—Irini never patronized any establishment without realizing or without reasoning out every order and expense—at the café at the far end of the square. Irini was not as well known to the waiters in this café, as it was diagonally across from her apartment and from the taverna the priest took them to, and, in the cartography of small neighborhoods, might as well have been a continent away. The waiter, an old man whose muscled forearms suggested a lifetime of bearing piled plates, barely glanced at Irini or at Anna as he took their orders—a lemonade for Irini and a coffee for Anna who was rethinking her plan to skip the party with her friends and thought the coffee would serve as useful prelude. Irini continued her explanation of the dialogue that Anna had misconstrued and this required some elaboration on the nature of the love triangle among the principals. It all hinged, she told Anna, on one word and how one understood it.
“Your French is so good,” Anna said, without having in fact any way to know whether Irini’s translation was correct. “Did you live there?”
“Sadly no. It was a hope of mine once. We were taught French in school, and sometimes I spoke it with my parents at home. Of course, my husband and I visited Paris in our youth. But then—” She shrugged.
“Was it the war?” the girl asked somewhat breathlessly. Anna had found that most disappointments in a Greek person’s life seemed to have something to do with the war, which one named as if there had been only one war, the war, so as to preserve a certain degree of political civility.
“Goodness, no,” Irini said. “The war was why we stopped speaking German.”
Anna waited for Irini to say more, but the older woman reached for the lemonade that the waiter had deposited along with Anna’s coffee and a small glass in which the bill lay curled. Irini took a sip and sputtered at the taste. She had expected something homemade, with sugar added to the pulpy liquid and still granular at the bottom of the glass. She had forgotten, confused by the historical period of the Truffaut film and by the era when it was filmed, that she was in Plaka in 2018 and not in Siros during her childhood or in the same part of Athens more than fifty years before.
“This is dreadful,” she said. “I can’t drink this.” She addressed this last to the waiter whose legs had not carried him away with the vigor that his arms possessed.
“Do I care?” he said. “Old fool.”
Irini knew she was supposed to have no answer to the man’s insulting question that should have put her in her place. But she refused to be chastened—if she had a philosophy it was precisely this: a refusal to be chastened—and so she replied.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I didn’t hear you. Can you please say it again?”
“What?”
“I didn’t quite catch what you said. Something about a fool. Did I hear that correctly?”
The man frowned at her with a disdain that was losing ground to confusion.
“Which one of us is the fool?” Anna said, leaning forward in her chair and hoping Irini noticed the emulation. “Was it me? I’m so sorry.”
The waiter shook his head.
“Feminists,” he muttered illogically, and turned for the kitchen.
It took little more than this gambit of mock sincerity and the look on the waiter’s face to make the two women burst into laughter. Something had happened at the rooftop cinema—their paired bemusement at the middle-aged man who had stood in a silhouette that blocked the screen, the solitude of the two of them in the rows of seats filled only by that man, until he stormed away, and the four teenagers, and most of all their shared attention to the transit of the moon across its ancient backdrop. All of this had brought Anna and Irini together and led Anna yet one more time to change her plans about the party. Fueled by caffeine she would not need now for the party, she sat instead with Irini in the square until the lemonade was gone—Irini knew never to waste food or drink, and this might have been another pillar of her philosophy—and until the restaurants at the other end began to turn their chairs upside down onto their oilcloth-covered tables.
What did they talk about all this time? What was worth more to Anna than taking her motorbike to Gazi to dance in the strobing string lights of a friend’s loft? Irini told Anna about the French New Wave and Jean Seberg and Belmondo, and Anna described the art collections at the gallery where she worked. They disagreed briefly over what Anna called her murals and Irini called vandalism. Irini warned Anna that though the city had very little crime she must still watch herself during her vandal’s outings at night alone. They spoke of Father Emmanouil and agreed that his homilies had lately lost their energy. They wondered about the burdens upon him of this holy time of year and whether his sons, who, as Irini pointed out, were beginning to display certain signs of loutishness, were weighing on his mind. Anna had made less progress in the Assumption readings than Irini. They promised each other they would do their best with the dolphin-gray photocopied list so as not to hurt Father Emmanouil’s feelings, though Anna did not add that it was for her own spiritual benefit and not Father E.’s that she would complete the assignment. It was after one when the grumbling waiter, making no pretense to simply jog their memory of the bill with a distant presence, came to stand quite frankly by their table and glare at the bill curled in the little glass. They placed their coins on the table—four euros from Anna’s wallet for the two of them—and rose. Before they parted for the night, they made a plan to see the rest of the Truffaut series together, with the next film to screen the very next night.