ATHENS, Greece — I walked out onto the rooftop of the six-story hostel building that overlooked the surrounding city’s downtown. The sun was white and bright in the early evening, blinding my eyes as they adjusted from the dim stairwell. The late-spring day was warm, but the weather was not yet hot enough to be unpleasant. A light cooling breeze still drifted from the sea.
It was an open rooftop with a few small tables, chairs, and a beanbag chair. On the far side of the roof was a large picnic table, and on the side with the door to the stairs was a small, air-conditioned hut that the rooftop bar operated from. I walked out toward the bar, where a young Greek in his 20s handing a bottle of beer to a blonde man of about 30. The blonde man holding the bottle turned to me as I approached.
“Hi,” he smiled. “Where are you from?”
He spoke in an accent strongly European, but from the few words I couldn’t tell whether he was Danish, Italian, German, or Swiss.
“America,” I said. “Texas. And you, are you German?” I guessed.
“No, Italian,” he was still smiling. “But I’ve lived the last five years in New Zealand.”
I shouldn’t have tried to guess where he was from. Some take offense when they’re mistaken for another nationality. But it would have been satisfying for me to have guessed correctly based on his introduction.
“Did you just get to Greece?” the Italian asked. He spoke eagerly as a man does when he loves to talk and sees potential conversation in someone he’s meeting. Here I realized that, if I would be passing the evening on the roof, I would not be spending it reading my book, which hung next to my waist in the camera bag strapped around my neck.
I told him it was my last night in Greece, and that I had spent the last nine days hiking in the Peloponnese, the mountainous peninsula in the western part of the country. He told me he had been in Greece for a few days with his brother.
The Italian walked across the roof to sit in a chair with his beer and talk to another man whom I hadn’t noticed until then — a tan, early middle-aged man sitting in one of the beanbag chairs furthest from the bar.
The bartender nodded to me, I ordered a glass of Amstel. He grabbed a smooth, fat, branded glass and put it under the faucet where the logo of the Greek beer stood noticeably as the only tap on the bar. The beer streamed dark gold into the glass as the bartender pressed down on the tap, pacing the motion so as to not let the foam overtake the glass’s rim. He handed me the beer.
I walked over to the two men’s conversation, sitting down at a table next to the older man’s beanbag chair. I listened to them talk and looked out across the roofs at the acropolis buildings on the hill in the center of the city. The hostel building wasn’t too far from the hill, and I could see the distant tourists line like ants around the ruins to watch the sun set over the buildings. I sipped the beer, and it ran cold and smooth down my throat as a beer should. I had tried a few Greek beers by this point, and Amstel was the only one I enjoyed.
The man crouching in the beanbag chair wore a graphic T-shirt and seemed to be in his late 30s. His hair was dark black, and the stubble that wrapped across his face was speckled with small flecks of gray starting to show. His flat nose pointed up toward his sunglasses, which made it so you couldn’t look at his face without seeing your own reflection. He and the Italian were talking about currencies, and how you can buy a lot in one country with an amount of money that seems like a little in another country. The Italian referenced one American who recently won two billion dollars in the lottery. The man, who was from Israel, corrected him, saying the amount won was only $250 million.
Here I interjected, I was sure the Powerball only gave out $250 million.
“Two billion is too much,” the Israeli nodded.
The Italian persisted a moment on the larger amount, but it was not worth hanging on to. The conversation moved to talk about my trip, then the Italian’s trip, then the trip of the Israeli, who had stayed in Greece for a little over a week. He had been traveling abroad for nine months, going from country to country as he pleased. In Israel, he had worked as a software developer for what couldn’t have been much more than 15 years. He had gotten tired of his job over the pandemic, and last year quit to take an international vacation, which had not yet stopped.
I had not come to the rooftop bar for conversation. But now that the conversation had started, I realized how nice it was to talk to people after a trip where I had spoken to few. I was stupid to think an evening on a rooftop bar at a downtown hostel would lead to anything other than socializing.
I had come to the roof that evening to read a book and drink a beer and feel the wind that came in salty from the sea carrying with it the smells of the city that the sun was setting behind. The city that smelled like cigarettes, hot asphalt, and streets crowded with cars producing warm exhaust. The smell of dumpsters with their overfilled, swollen bags spilling out onto the uneven sidewalks. And in between the dumpsters, the sidewalks were cracked to make room for orange trees which burst out of them and shaded the streets. And the trees broke through the bad smells with a comforting, sweet scent of oranges that had fallen and burst open on the pavement. Along the pavement were the bakeries, where tan old men would sit through the afternoon and slowly drink their bold, fruity shots of coffee. And above the bakeries, the terraces of apartments jetted from the graffitied buildings, all brimming with viny, lush houseplants that stole one’s attention from dumpsters they covered. On one street corner was the smell of street food smoking from a slowly spinning skewer of meat, and on the other corner was the fragrance of oranges split open on the sidewalk. In between these would be the cigarettes, the asphalt, and the dumpsters. And the smells would join the sounds of honking and motors, and the laughing of old men over their coffees, and the distant music from street beggars and restaurants. And the wind would carry all this from the sea to the rooftop, where I sat now in the bright white of the sun, in an early evening of the late spring, talking to strangers from places I had never been.
The sun set lower into the Athenian skyline, and soon more men walked from the stairwell onto the rooftop. They had already known each other from previous nights spent at the hostel. Among the group was a Californian backpacker who had just graduated from university, a Mexican musician who had some work across Europe, and a Canadian house flipper of Greek descent who was looking to move to the country with family.
For a short time, the conversation drifted between us all. But after introductions, it broke into gradually smaller groups, as inevitably happens when a party becomes too bloated to be sustained by a single line of dialogue. I found myself sitting with the man from Israel talking about travel and Greek food, which he was not fond of. We spoke about his old life in the north of Israel, and I felt it hard not to ask of his feelings about Palestine.
It was in bad taste to ask about politics. There’s a risk whenever you bring up something like that. The man you’re speaking to could shut down, tired of talking about the topic that he’s discussed many times before. But for other men, the politics of their country are their main interest, and they’ll gladly discuss them in any setting.
“We don’t have to talk about this if you don’t want to,” I said, awkwardly giving him a way out of the conversation. “But what do you think will happen with Palestine?”
He shook his head hesitantly, but I couldn’t tell whether his expression was distaste or restrain. He seemed uncertain if wanted to continue the conversation.
“I don’t think anything will change,” he said solemnly with a slight air of frustration. His frustration wasn’t directed at me but at the situation of his country.
“Yeah?” I prodded, cautiously resolving to hear his opinion. “Why’s that?”
“No matter what they do a side will lose,” he said. “If they make Palestine a country, what about the Arabs in Israel? And in Jerusalem, there are too many Arabs and Jews together, would they split the city in half? There is no fix that works for both sides.”
It was not my place to say what should happen to his country. I had read and written about the situation in Israel and Palestine for school, but I had not thought deep enough to seriously form my own opinion. Still, it was frustrating to hear someone say there was no solution.
“But what if they made Jerusalem like the Vatican City, not owned by either side, and split Israel, Palestine and Jerusalem into three?”
“That wouldn’t work,” he had not stopped shaking his head. “Many of the Arabs and the Jews in the city would want to live in their country, and many of the Arabs living in Israel would be forced out of their homes into Palestine as refugees. And once a person moves into a place as a refugee, their children will also always feel like refugees, and their children too, until they move back to where their parents were forced from.”
“So there just is no solution? What if you gave the people in Jerusalem dual citizenship, or had them choose which country they wanted to be a part of?”
“They wouldn’t like that,” he said. “And that does not solve things for the Arabs in Israel.”
“It would end up like Pakistan and India,” I resolved. “Too much tension caused by other governments drawing borders for other countries.”
“Yes, and in Pakistan, you had millions of Muslims and Hindus moving across the borders. That would not happen well in Israel and Palestine, just like Pakistan.”
That was the sum of the conversation, which lasted well into the night. We reached no silver lining to the political situation of his country, and throughout the discussion, his restrained sadness had grown more apparent. Still, he continued to keep talking until I brought up a lighter topic that I’ve since forgotten.
Five minutes to midnight, the Canadian and a Scotsman stood up from their conversation across the roof to pay for their night of drinks at the bar that was about to close. I drew our discourse to an end, referencing my morning flight and shaking hands with the Israeli. The stairwell was dark now, and I walked down blindly into the room of four cheap, hard-mattressed bunk beds where I’d sleep. For the rest of the night, I lay next to the open window, listening to the constant sounds of the cars, restaurants, and street performers of the city below, which was warm with people and cars and orange trees.