Green Neon

8 Of earthquakes and sunglasses

The next morning, Tom accompanied Christina to Athens. While she went to the office, he roamed the streets in the city center. There was something to discover around every corner. Everything was new to him, everything was different than in Germany. Never before had he experienced temperatures of almost 40 degrees for several days in a row; no city he knew was so noisy and full of people.

Nevertheless, he almost felt at home. He only unfolded the map of the city, on which he had marked the spots Christina had recommended, when it was almost two o'clock, the time they were supposed to meet. He got to her office on time and after a quick bite to eat at a stall they rode back to Piraeus.

The short subway ride made him drowsy, and when Christina announced she was going to rest for an hour, he settled into his bed in the spare room to read but dozed off before he'd read a single page.

He dreamed, and in this dream the accumulated impressions of the past few days were woven into a montage of gray taxis, Nikos, blue buses, Sophia, a bright beach - and again and again the Acropolis emerged from the sea of ​​houses. It loomed over every point in Athens.

In his dream the heat grew oppressive, the street noise intensified and grew more real at the same time. Still half asleep, he sat up and opened his eyes. He wasn't sure whether or not he was still dreaming. The noise kept rising, but it wasn't street noise. Tom couldn't describe it. The air vibrated with a metallic din . A clatter that seemed to come from all sides.

Startled, he noticed that the heavy bookshelf next to his bed was shaking. The hanging lamp in the middle of the room swung back and forth. This wasn't a dream - the house was moving. It took Tom a few moments to realize this was an earthquake.

He jumped out of bed in his underpants, rushed in a panic into the hallway, and almost knocked Christina over. She shouted to him over the deafening roar to stand under a doorway. Tom left his body and watched himself from the hallway ceiling. He saw himself in the entrance to his room while Christina, pale and nervous, dressed only in a white nightgown, stood in the living room doorway. Everything in the apartment rocked, and even the floor swayed like the deck of a ship in a storm.

For an eternity they remained motionless, as if the slightest movement could possibly be the impetus that would bring the whole house down. Suddenly it was quiet. There were a few more metallic clicks, and then silence. The furniture stopped swaying and the lamps gradually settled into their normal positions.

When Tom returned to his body, the ground was solid beneath his feet again. He exhaled. He had been unconsciously been holding his breath this whole time. He wondered why he had lasted so long. Christina also looked relieved. She crept into the living room and looked around in all directions. Tom also examined his surroundings, but could detect no changes. Everything was where it should be and nothing was moving. Even the wine glasses in the living room cabinet were not unbroken.

Without a word, the two stepped out onto the balcony, and now Tom realized where the terrible sound that had frightened him had come from from. The noise originated from the balconies that occupied the entire height and width on the south side of the building. The awnings were suspended from aluminum rods whose metal tubes had been colliding during the earthquake.

Christina gave him a tense smile.

"So that was your first earthquake. You haven't been to Greece if you haven't experienced one. Do you know how long that actually took?"

An earthquake. Something like that was only known in Germany from the news. Tom recalled the terrible catastrophe that had devastated the Yugoslav city of Skopje and claimed the lives of over a thousand. How long do earthquakes like this last? An hour, two, three? He looked at the clock on the living room wall, which had apparently stopped during the earthquake, for it read only fifteen minutes later than when he had gone to bed. And he had slept for a quarter of an hour, he calculated.