You Are in Athens
By AmHm • Jul 23rd, 2009 at 1:08 pm • Category: Fiction| Hot: |  |  | | | |
In the very early morning in the fall of 1979 a particular beach along the Aegean Sea in Athens is nearly deserted. You have not yet slept, as your crew-mates have gotten ahold of your judgment once again, and you have been out all night. But you are alone now, and the soft pink horizon gives context to your solitude. You stroll the shoreline, smoking a cigarette, thinking of home and taking stock of the day ahead of you, when, in an instant, your life changes forever.
You are not hit with a meteor, nor are you shot in the back by an enemy, mauled by a wild dog, or swallowed whole by a shark. You do not have a heart attack, or a stroke or a spasm in your back that causes permanent paralysis and a slack jaw. You have no epiphany. What you do have, suddenly, is a woman.
Thin and birdlike, she balances on one leg to wash her feet in a tide-pool of cold salt water. She has not yet noticed you, and she goes about her washing as if she could be doing anything at all. There is nothing deliberate about her movements; it is as if she is simply an extension of the morning fog around her, supported each moment only by her flexibility to the changing whims of the air.
When she notices you she stops and lowers her foot so that when you approach her she is standing up to her knees in Mediterranean salt water. You begin to speak, though you can’t imagine now what you’d try to say, but she shakes her head. She is not Greek. You had already guessed by her fair skin.
Do you speak English? You fumble for the words. Your hands seem light, fluttering like dusty moths around your sunlit face as you try to explain: no, not really, just a little – a little English. She smiles slowly at you, at once thoughtful and amused, but not a bit wary. She says, “Maybe I should teach you.”
Twenty years from now, in a fit of defeat after being laid-off, you will tell her that you hate her. You will suffer and rage and, in private, you will cry. You will smoke too many cigarettes, drink too much bad American beer, and you will replay in your head, over and over again, how to tell your children that you are leaving; you are going back to Egypt.
Once, you even begin to pack your things, methodically filling up a large black suitcase. You iron and fold your shirts, trousers and even your socks; you pack your Koran, a photo album and your Aramis cologne. Then you venture into the damp basement to rummage through boxes of your old life, grasping at mementos to bring into your new one.
And while you are rummaging, you come across the notebooks. Dozens of them; the English alphabet over and over, tiny drawings to illustrate meaning, notes in the margins, letters, numbers, words and eventually sentences and paragraphs, her handwriting first, then yours below. And you remember her patience, her care, and you remember that she is as stuck as you are.
And you don’t leave. And you don’t hate her, that girl who washed her feet. What you hate is your American life – your small town in rural New Hampshire, your musty basement, your gray Pontiac sunbird with the CB radio; your polo shirts, nametag, cable TV, and, though you are now a Citizen, you have grown to hate Americans and the way they look at you.
Your hate makes you angry, but, after a while, it also makes you grateful. Those notebooks remind you that she too, your wife, lives the same (not really so terrible) life, and that she has never ever stopped trying.
And when you fall in love with her again (for, you’re beginning to realize, it happens over and over,) you will try to forget how you ever hated her and you will remember that first morning on the beaches of Athens when you began to know love.
