Αθήνα
I’m a cockroach by habit.
September 2021; June — August 2022
Athens is full of cars and men.
In Paris, I wrote about a bridge. In Barcelona, I wrote about a cathedral. What will I write about in Athens, this ancient city built on ruins and rocks? (A hotel.)
I should ask the cockroaches under my sink how they do it. How to survive on the smallest crumb, the tiniest drop of oil. How to keep going. Do they miss the tropics?
The world appears like a text written in Greek, beautiful and inaccessible. While others live, I observe. I sit in bars like a pervert without a trenchcoat, with my book and the dried-up pen. I’m so invisible that people keep walking into me, I’m a ghost in leather boots.
Athens feels like metal and chrome. Athens smells of piss and gasoline. Athens tastes like salt, fat, and sun.
Towards the Acropolis: Next to a little stall where I buy a silver snake ring, a dead frog lies on the street, flattened and dried by the sun.
On the way to Mount Lykabettos: The sun hangs in the sky like someone picked up one of the dirty oranges from the street and just put it there.
Three months can pass like all time passes ever since the start of our slow apocalypse, like Athens in August — strangely empty. Nothing seems real anymore except despair.
Each layer somehow remains two-dimensional in this polyethylene world, fake, artificial; even the linen sheets and wax candles and clay bowls with which we frantically stage our lives. Nothing really breaks plastic, it just wears out and fades. And so I will fade after three months under the Greek sun.
I play table tennis with the silent Israeli in a communist bar in Exarchia; young Turkish men gather there and drink, an old man with a long white beard sits motionless in front of a full chessboard, only his eyes move wearily with our pingpong game.
It’s right after midnight, on an island near Athens. We drink four bottles of Ouzo in an abandoned taverna until we want more. The night is dark and the stars hard and bright. We run naked into the oily black sea; it swallows us whole.
I make friends with the Turkish men in the pingong bar; the old man speaks excellent English and beats me 11–9.
Greeks are very serious and judgmental, I learn. I should get along with them perfectly. But they’re serious in Greek, and I judge them in German.
I dance ballet in the anarchist quarter. I listen to techno trying to sleep.
I eat battered cod and octopus, I drown myself in ouzo and the translucent Aegean sea, I get stung by a sea urchin. I hate the twenty-first century.
I order food, I stain my shorts, I’m on my phone a lot. I lie.
I should ask the cockroaches under my sink how they do it, but they’re dead.
— to be continued…
December 2023
Dirty oranges and milk light.
At home, it’s Nikolaus: a friendly, pre-christmas tradition of chocolate buried in boots and presents hidden in snow (that was when I was a child, now the planet is warming and there’s only melting chocolate). In Athens, it’s a sad and angry day, the killing of a student by police, with riots in the streets of Exarchia. We walk downtown towards Panepistimio, burying our faces in our collars to protect them from the tear gas wafting through the streets. A burning sensation in your eyes, nose, throat, and lungs. There’s smoke in the distance. Policemen on motorbikes, swarming down the street like aggressive bees, at least twenty of them, chasing behind a few guys running. My friend recognizes a friend of hers.
Eating a hearty meal of chicken and potatoes in Kypseli. An old man next to me chewing, a young man opposite me staring at his phone, men, always just men in Athens. I love Greece, but Greece seems to belong to men: He’s the French bookseller I’m ordering a Greek book in translation from, he’s the white-haired man in the restaurant straightening out my tablecloth, they are the young, ear-ringed waiters letting me taste wines made with pines and crushed by rocks.
They are selling Christmas trees in front of Pedion tou Areos park. At the entrance of the building in Mavromichali, there are lights wrapped around the stair rails rhythmically convulsing like caught in an epileptic shock.
At the restaurant with the silver furniture, we eat golden thistle from Crete. They’re growing on the rocks of Chania, and are hard to excavate, the waitress tells us. Their crumbled, thorny leaves feel prickly on the tongue. We buy slim, yellow beeswax candles, an offering.
What am I offering?
In an abandoned building, we drink Rakomelo, hot raki with honey. I go see an exhibition about Iannis Xenakis, slightly drunk after lunch with wine in the belly of Diporto. The barkeeper in the oldest bar in town hands me a martini in a frozen glass.
I lick my lips. I open my mouth, stick out my tongue.
I love this city. I’m offering myself up to it.
Photo credits: Ian Tulud (IG: @youngtilapia)
