DANCING BEAR

I remember hearing a low growl, a sound that couldn’t have come from any of the humans at the market.

- DIMITRI NASRALLAH​​​​​​​

WHEN I WAS FOUR YEARS OLD, my family’s neighbourhood in Beirut turned into a battleground between the Palestinian Liberation Organization and the Israeli military, and so we left Lebanon. It was 1982, and the country had already experienced seven years of civil war; there was nowhere for us to go but the sea. We slept atop a crowded ferry deck in two foldout beach chairs, our suitcases leaning against us, as we made our way to Greece.

During our first months in Athens, I spent my mornings standing out on the balcony of our apartment, studying the busy street below. As lunch approached and the days grew hot, the stores closed one by one. The shopkeepers stopped shouting at beggars and locked their doors, disappearing into the dark recesses of their living quarters. While everyone else slept through the sun-baked afternoons, I watched cartoon animals speak in Greek overdubs I could not understand.

I did a lot of staying quiet in those days. We still carried with us a stench of war. My parents instructed me to not open my mouth in public, to try to blend in as much as possible. My father had hastily arranged for us to sit out the siege of Beirut by securing work at his advertising agency’s small Greek office, but we didn’t know how long the company would allow us to stay. We had brought only our clothes and some photo albums with us. Everything else had been left behind.

In the long Athenian dusk, the city’s streets became busy again when shopkeepers and residents took advantage of the cooler air. One evening, to lighten our moods, my father decided to take us to a night market, where locals would gather to socialize and stroll after slow days at work.