I noticed one young mother sitting on a blanket, a sky-blue hijab draped loosely over her head. In her arms she held a tiny baby, probably just a few weeks old – its hands and legs like twigs, sticking out of the blanket. It was like she was holding a dead thing, rocking a dead thing in her arms, as if her eyes knew this but her body didn’t. An old Greek woman knelt down on the ground beside them, helping the mother give bottled milk-formula to the baby, but the baby would not feed. The old woman gave up, and instead she poured a big glass of condensed milk and filled a paper plate with chocolate biscuits and gave it to the mother, encouraging her to eat and drink, pushing the cup up to her mouth whenever she stopped.
‘Pies to olo – all of it,’ the old woman said, in Greek and English, and the young mother seemed to understand one of them and she gulped it down now and held the cup out for more. The old woman gave her another glass, then, when she was done, the old woman took the mother’s hands in hers and cleaned them with baby wipes and massaged them with cream. The mother’s eyes were sad, blue as the sea and far away.
‘Beautiful Mahsa,’ the old lady said, and kissed the baby’s forehead.
Mahsa. The baby was a girl. I watched the ease between the women, the way they interacted with such few words. They knew each other – the old lady had probably been here many times before.
‘Den echies gala?’ the old woman said, and in response the mother pressed her breast with her palm and shook her head. ‘Ochi,’ she said.
I noticed again the man on the step of the statue. He had his guitar on his lap: a beautiful instrument, almost a lute, but not exactly. He plucked the strings and then played a short melody. It produced a wash of sound, a sudden harmony like a rain shower on a sunny day, echoing softly from its wooden chamber.
There was a frown on the man’s face as he abruptly stopped playing and continued to fine-tune. After a while he put the instrument down by his feet and rolled a cigarette. I got up and sat beside him in the shadow of the statue. There was something warm about this man’s face, inviting, even in its silence.
‘Good morning,’ he said in Farsi, in a voice as deep and melodic as his music, and he offered me the cigarette he had just rolled.
‘No, thank you,’ I said, in Arabic. ‘I don’t smoke.’ And in that moment we both started to laugh at the strangeness of our situations. Here we found ourselves in Greece, one man speaking Arabic, the other Farsi.
‘Do you speak English?’ I said.
The man’s eyes lit up. ‘Yes! Not very, very good, but yes! Thanks gods, we have found same language!’ There was real humour in this man – he sang as he talked.
‘Where are you from?’ I said.
‘Afghanistan, outside Kabul. You are from Syria?’
‘Yes,’ I said.
His fingernails were long, and although he was not a bulky man, there was a suggestion of strength in his movements.
‘I like your guitar,’ I said.
‘This instrument is rebab. It means “door of the soul”。’ Then he told me his name was Nadim.
I remained perched on the step beside him as he picked up the rebab and began to play again, a slow quiet melody that trickled through the air in deep waves. I watched Afra as she woke up and unfolded herself from the blanket, feeling around with her hand to see if I was there. When she didn’t find me, her features tightened and she called for me. I went over immediately and touched her hand and watched as her face softened. There was a part of me that was pleased to see this fear in her when she thought she’d lost me, because it meant that she still loved me, that even when she was locked inside herself she still needed me. I unwrapped the sandwiches that had been left for us and handed one to her.
After a while she said, ‘Nuri, who is playing the music?’
‘A man called Nadim.’
‘It’s beautiful.’
And as the hours passed the music washed over us, and when Nadim stopped playing and took a nap the absence of the music suddenly opened a door to other sounds: twigs snapping and breaking in the woods and murmurings and whispers and children playing. I wanted to wake him and tell him to play his music forever so that I would never hear anything else but the moving melody of the rebab until the day that I died. And if Angeliki was right, if we could never leave this place, then Afra and I would die here with the predators of the night and the heroes of a battle unknown to us.
When the sun set the campfire was lit and the place filled with smoke and the smell of burning wood. People gathered around its warmth and I was reminded of Farmakonisi. But the people were different on that island. Here it was as if we were all living in the darkest shadow of a solar eclipse.