Inheritance

My papou was born on a Greek island in the northern Aegean, when it was still under Ottoman rule. The island was once the home of Hephaestus, the ugliest god of all, yet the island is a wild beauty with sand dunes, spheric volcanic formations, and deep blue waters hugging its rugged shores. Papou told my dad that when he left the island at sixteen to find work in Egypt, he stopped dreaming for a long time. He knew he had stopped dreaming because he had always had vivid dreams that would wake him up at night. In Marsa Matruh, my grandparents owned a Greek bakery that shared a wall with their one-bedroom home. Years before dad was born, they thought they had found happiness by the Mediterranean Sea. But war happened. The British ordered the residents to evacuate. My yiayia and uncle packed two suitcases and left for a village near Suez, while papou stayed behind to bake bread for the troops. Days passed. Weeks passed. That’s when his vivid dreams returned. A woman in a black khimar walked toward the bakery, her eyes fixed on the man behind the glass door. Papou stepped outside into an abandoned village muted in sepia. Habibi, I can’t protect you anymore. Go to your family, the woman warned. He woke up drenched in sweat. Several hours of pacing, thinking, rethinking, and staring at cold ovens, pushed papou to lock up the bakery, throw some clothes in a duffel bag, pack up a couple of heirlooms, and take a car to Alexandria. Soon he will hold his family in his arms, he thought. Only days after settling in the city, papou learned that a bomb had fallen near the bakery, leveling the entire block. A single wall of their mud-brick house remained; the wall shared with the destroyed shop. The houses and shops looked like Ptolemaic ruins, the desert sands waiting patiently to make them one with the sepia-toned terrain. With everything gone, my grandparents and uncle started a new life in a new home. Dad has told this story many times. I never met my papou. My dad and his family left Egypt in the late 1960s. And when my papou and yiayia eventually got the chance to visit their island and feel its golden sand and cool waters beneath their feet once again, papou said that the trip felt like a déjà vu.

I’ve had my own nightmares that have woken me up at night. The types of dreams that make me wonder if life is full of coincidences or if there was something more behind my papou’s stories. A girl in a Venetian mask held my hand as we snaked through a drunk crowd. While climbing the stairs, she squeezed my hand so tight that I couldn’t break free. She pulled me closer to her now unmasked face, closer to her grey skin, closer to her sharp teeth. Somehow, I escaped her grasp and ran into a bedroom full of zombie-like creatures staring at me. I ran away as fast as I could down an expanding hallway, but when I thought I had finally reached the stairs, something grabbed my shoulder. My body floated in a void until I stepped into the next scene. A sound outside the living room window made me peer through the blinds. It was only the palm tree swaying in the breeze. Suddenly a face appeared right up against the glass, the face of a man with beady eyes and a twisted smirk. His eyes locked with mine as he proceeded to break in. My own scream woke me. This was when my parents and I lived in a pink house in a quiet neighborhood near Disney. When home alone, I would listen to music loud enough to drown out the silence. Right after that dream, however, I stopped my loud EDM sessions. I couldn’t get that stranger’s face out of my mind. A few days later, I sat in front of the desktop revising a short story to keep my mind busy before work. I couldn’t focus though. Something felt off. My parents had left the house. I looked at the time on the computer and contemplated if I should call in sick, drive to my boyfriend’s house to work on the story together. Instead, I got to the mall a half hour early. “Thank God. You’re okay,” my mom’s voice trembled when my parents finally reached me on the phone. “They broke the house. They broke down the door. They took your computer, the TVs,” dad began explaining in Greek. If I had not left early that afternoon, if I were taking a shower when they … “Don’t dwell on it,” my dad told me. “We’re all safe. They took replaceable things. The dog will be fine too.” I sat on a white cube by the hanger storage bins, picturing poor Picasso, the Rat Terrier who was all bark and no bite. They had found him shaking under the kitchen table. My mind then quickly went to my stolen computer that stored my stories, my photos, my memories. I just wanted to go home. But our home didn’t feel like ours after that afternoon. We moved that summer.