You can't dance on an empty street

August is supposed to be the black month of Athens, bright and clotted with pustules of heat. But that’s a fiction those island folk make up, lounging on some hot spot of rock and thinking of this melting city.

Most of the Athens has fled itself this month, not looking back as they steam out of Piraeus, the harbor rocking with froth. Around the big holiday of the 15th the city was at its emptiest and for the first time since I arrived it felt like there was a bit of spare space, some pockets in spots that weren’t stacked with fumes and sweaty shirts. It was as if I had been walking all this time with every person pushing on my chest and now the hands were gone. And it started to feel so different even if the city seemed just a little toned down, just a few gaps between its teeth of traffic—a sheepish smile that shone only to those who stayed.

In the center, the city still felt busy. Though all the little shops just off the main ways had been closing their shutters since the week before still I waited for the big shut, some resounding sound like a lock turning over in a empty house that would mark for certain the closing of Athens.

I waited, and still it did not sound. I had been savoring the rumors I had heard that even Syntagma Square would be empty but for its itinerant dogs. Even in crowds they move like kings, chasing the street sweeper like it was some blustering big cat and drinking from the marble fountain like it was their own little dish, so what would they make of the city’s center all to themselves? But on the day before the long weekend the dogs waited to cross the street with the other commuters, still as much on business as the rest of us.

Crossing that same street today, the dogs beside me as the city once more fills, I can see how easy I had it. The traffic two weeks ago turned all yellow, private cars gone and taxis all left alone on the black streets. South of Athens it was even better, and the only car was a red dot on the black. In the little neighborhoods, it was all a long nap, the shade made from sleeping cats. I could stroll anywhere. I could have slept on the streets. I could have strung dominos across the faded crosswalks. Where was the city my friendly nemesis, who always kept me sharp and guessing?

Moving through the city absent its vehicles and people was like witnessing a body without enough blood, at its heart still knotting with goings but at its limbs all cool with silence, silence that for moments hung like smoke, not an absence so much as something tangible and timid that only now found emptiness enough to peer out asking “how?”.

Reaching the other side of the street I realize what I missed in all the relative quiet was my morning dance. And now with the return of the traffic so too does my partner. Even you’d rather sit it out, even if I sometimes think I’d rather have the city slumber for a few days more, the dance comes as the cars rush in.

If you join me and cross the city with your feet you’ll soon be tapping them along, and stolid in your bones though you’d rather be, the center is in your hips, sliding past bumpers, slipping back inches from the passing taxis sailing unconcerned through red lights, brushing shoulders with strangers and curving around scooters now and then on your toes.

Ya’ll know I can’t dance so maybe this is the closest I’ll get and if you saw my grin though it looks so often grim you’d know I enjoy it and maybe I like it more because the woman tries to step on my toes and she’s my height too and sometimes she tries to kill me but I know that must be because she likes me. I never feel embarrassed because she’s as bad as me and she’ll always be there besides and she never says much either but that’s alright.

Laconic though she is I think she wants to dance because on these streets walking across them is an act of rebellion. Crossing traffic—no fear, no regrets—is my little insurgency and I think she likes the fight in me. There’s no space left to walk, and there’s no regard for those who walk—more like contempt, as if putting my feet to the pavement were a personal insult to everyone straddling an engine. So fuck you right back. My advice to all future guerillas:


Staring down an errant, just-slowing-down-in-time taxi driver won’t do you much good—Greek aren’t capable of showing or admitting shame, just like Rhinos can’t experience ennui and sparrows can’t read Czech, it just wouldn’t make sense—but blister them with your eyes if you can. Then walk slow across the road. Make them stop. Hold them up. Get in their way. Watch the scooters, like wasps, jostle and jitter in agitation. Crossing the street is taking back the street—and it was no choice of us, the pedestrians, it’s just the only way to walk. Only attitude will ferry you across, and sometimes, I feel like jumping on their hoods and treating the metal like a springy mattress.

Fear is part of it—am I going to make it across before becoming a hood ornament?—but it’s what makes you bold and if you put it forward in your mouth and taste it I think it kicks you forward— and damn them all! There’s a current beneath the passing sheets of metal and with a Zen-like buoyancy all you have do is float. And no taxi driver would want to ruin the hood of his car anyway.

If you make it across the street, you still have the Greeks on foot to deal with—all of them slow like they were trying to pull dimes along the street with the bottom of their feet or drifting back and forth like they had just stepped off ship and headed straight for the bar0. They’ll stop and talk. They’ll pause to put their bags down. Or they’ll just stand there, for no reason at all. Jump, twist, curl into a knot or stretch into a swimmer’s stroke, parting the people and propelling yourself through the thick air, whatever it takes not to stop. I’ve even spun to avoid stopping—like she grabbed my hand and this time twirled me.


Such is the dance Athena taught me and I don’t think I can dance it with any other. I missed her, in those empty days of the city now passing away. Maybe she was still there, resting her feet. I know she couldn’t have missed me, because I was there, trying to dance on those nearly empty streets, missing her hand in mine.