“You will be close by the Acropolis,” the driver said. “You can walk up to it from the pension.” She mumbled something polite and interested and tried to remember what the Acropolis was. She had a jumble of Greek names in her head from school—Plato, Zeus, Aristotle—but she couldn’t remember who had done what to whom, where. The pension was in an old building on a narrow street. There was a little shade here from the sun. The driver had to ring a bell for her. A buzzer sounded and he pushed the door open. He held it for her and she walked into a cool, dark hallway. For a moment, she was unsure. Maybe she shouldn’t have trusted this driver to take her to a decent place. “It’s up the elevator,” he said, pushing past her with her luggage. His voice was matter-of-fact, and that reassured her. She followed him to the elevator and they rode it to the second floor. The pension itself was bright and clean. She felt stupid for worrying in the hallway, and she was glad she hadn’t said anything. They walked to a reception desk where a smiling, middle-aged woman waited behind a narrow desk cluttered with a locked telephone, a cardboard placard advertising bus tours of Athens and day trips to Daphni, Eleusis, and Cape Sounion, and a rack of slightly bent postcards of the Parthenon, the temple of Athena Nike, Hadrian’s Arch, and a skyline of modern Athens. The woman looked up from behind this clutter and smiled, recognizing the driver. She spoke to him first in Greek, and he answered. Then she turned to Miriam. “So you will stay how many days?” she asked. Her voice was gentle and friendly. “For a week, I think,” Miriam answered. “I’m going to meet some friends and then we’re going to travel.” “Ah, that’s nice,” the woman said. She was still smiling, although she’d started writing in her book as soon as Miriam had said that she would be staying a week. “It is thirty-five euro a night, for a single,” she said. “May I see the room first, before I decide?” Miriam asked. The woman looked mortally offended. “You may pay whenever you leave,” she said, and handed Miriam her key. Miriam paid the cab driver. It was the first time she’d used her euros. His smile was condescending and she wondered if she’d given him too much or too little.
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Her room was small and it faced a courtyard. The shower and the bathroom were at the end of the hall. She unpacked a few of her things and then sat down and tried to begin a letter to her parents. She couldn’t think of what to write. She had only slept a little on the plane, and now her jet lag hit in a great wave and she literally crawled the few feet from the table to the bed. It was dark when she woke up. She had no idea what time it was. She felt lost, as if the nap had somehow thrown her behind the day. She was terribly hungry. She got dressed automatically and left the room. The woman was no longer at the reception desk. Instead, there was a dark young man with greasy hair. He held a newspaper in his hands. His coat and shirt were too short and she could see his wrists. “Can you tell me what time it is?” she asked. “Sorry,” he said, looking up from his paper. “No English.” She pointed at her wrist and he looked at his own and for a moment she was afraid that he would think that she was making a comment about how short his sleeves were. Then he seemed to understand. He smiled and pointed to a clock sitting facing him on the desk. It was seven-thirty. She went out into the warm night. She still felt strange, out of step. It was as if she were not really there, like a ghost who doesn’t yet know she’s dead, trying vainly to talk to the living, hurried world to which she no longer belonged. She walked for several blocks, looking into the windows of closed shops. The colors of everything in the windows were odd to her, somehow flat. A shop selling something ordinary like jeans or leather bags would never have looked like that at home. Everything was different. Everything was foreign. The streets were crowded, warm, and there was a lot of pushing. She was jostled a few times, and she had to keep up with the flow of the crowd. At last she saw something that looked like a restaurant. She was really very hungry. She went inside. It was a big room, brightly lit. She walked in past a cashier, and toward a counter filled with foods. Behind her the cashier yelled something. Miriam approached the counter. There were stews with meats and vegetables. There were olives and peppers in trays. A woman was waiting behind the counter. Miriam looked up at her. “I’d like some of this,” she said, pointing at one of the stews.
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