After hours, the three of us arrive back at our hostel. The night continues to live out its last throes in the crowded street circuits of bars and clubs and jazz cabarets we’ve come from––endless masses of people: people sitting at bars, people standing at bars, people glimpsed writhing against each other in sweaty dance rooms, people spilling out onto the street with their drinks and boisterous laughter, people shouting conversations in Italian over club music and street music, people dancing on the stone streets to tambourines and guerilla musicians, people living. But the last ten minutes of boulevards and back alleys we’ve walked are dead, silent as a grave except for the motorbike that shot past us on a narrow street without sidewalks, its growls ricocheting against the walls of looming buildings.
“I don’t know if I like this city,” says Ollie. “It’s so claustrophobic.” His eyes dart around, as if scanning for brigands hiding around shadowy corners. He is an Irish Erasmus student studying in Rome, only in town for a disjointed weekend of solo-traveling that he wasn’t ready for. He strikes me as very anxious. He sways now, which I don’t think he realizes he’s doing.
And Palermo is claustrophobic, this witching hour city with its labyrinth of continuous walls, as if each building is melting into the next, broken up only by doorways, window balconies strung with damp laundry, and desiccated rubble where apartments hit by World War II bombs were never rebuilt. More than once we are spat out into vast piazzas, empty so late in the night except for skeletal, feral cats, each guarded by the phantasmagoric shadow of its own centuries-old church.
“Isn’t that its charm?” I ask. I feel sick. Maybe I shouldn’t have spoken, giving the bile rising in my throat an escape route. I swallow it back down and shudder.
Our other companion, Andrei, who has introduced himself as a medical student, I assume from somewhere in Eastern Europe, nods his head. He doesn’t seem as affected as the two of us though he’s drunk just as much. He’s said very little this whole night, less now on our walk back. He doesn’t look at us as he speaks, intent on unlocking the hostel front door. “I like this city,” he says now. He has an accent, but it’s only barely present in his low voice. “I like it.”
The finicky door finally swings open and we spill inside, grateful for the little warmth of the hostel foyer. We clatter onto its tiled floor and race each other up the two floors of stairs to the lobby. My brain hammers against my skull, but our stair calisthenics get my blood rushing again and I feel buoyant, bounding upward, skipping each second step. Ollie slips, the poor guy, and Andrei and I each slide an arm under an armpit and lift him the rest of the way. We reach the deserted lobby and collapse into ancient, uncomfortable armchairs.
We met for the first time in this lobby around dinnertime, Ollie and I separately unsure of where to eat, Andrei knowledgeable at the end of his week at the hostel. Ollie had stood at the front desk, hopelessly ringing the bell to ask an absent attendant for restaurant recommendations. I sat in this same armchair wondering what had possessed me to actually make the journey to see an ex-girlfriend in Sicily. She hadn’t let me stay as I’d hoped she would, so I found myself here: in a sketchy hostel lobby with my head in my hands getting pissed off at the son of a bitch who kept ringing that damn bell. Andrei appeared in the room: a dark angel, intense eyes, savior of my sanity, a little shorter than me but certainly taller than Ollie. Tucked under an arm was a textbook of anatomy in a language that wasn’t English and wasn’t Italian either. He dressed cool in leather and denim with his hair a little long like he could be a local, but there was something of the soviet bloc about him I just couldn’t quite shake. He asked us if there was anything he could help Ollie with, he didn’t work here, but he knew Palermo and the hostel well enough. Ollie explained he just wanted to know where to eat around here that wasn’t a scam or a tourist trap like the place he’d been to for lunch. Andrei told him he was just going out for dinner and was welcome to join, and in my already-tipsy desperation, I called out to them to ask if I could join.
We became a little acquainted over spleen sandwiches and arancini bought from street vendors. We ate on a city bench in the Port of Palermo watching the sun sink below the Mediterranean and speedboats return to the shore. Wasn’t this the life? Ollie volunteered a great deal about himself, Andrei less so. I told them about my ex, and they patted me on the back and called her a bitch, which is what I was looking for. The perfect set-up for a bar crawl.
Ollie is crying now, lying back with his feet propped up on a dusty ottoman. “I just want to escape this place, this life. The walls–––why are they closing in?”
I shake my head. “They’re not moving.” But in the dim light of the lobby, they do kind of move, in the way that TV static shimmies on the screen. I blink my eyes a few times, and I find that anytime I focus long enough on one spot it goes away. “The walls, they’re fine.”
“I just feel trapped!” he cries. “I have to get out! I have to see the sky!” He’s practically tearing his hair out, and I’m reminded of my loathing for him when he was ringing and ringing and ringing that bell. I roll my eyes as my stomach churns something fierce.
“Just…shut up, man…Ollie…the whole building can probably hear you…” I feel bad saying it as soon as the words are out of my mouth, but maybe I don’t feel bad, maybe my drunkenness reveals me as a terrible, uncaring person. I feel bad. I stare at the dingy hallway connecting the lobby to the rest of the hostel. It’s completely dark, an empty kind of dark that makes me shiver. Ollie whimpers. I speak again: “Or not…no one’s woken up just yet. Can’t you just go back outside?”
“But you can’t see the sky from those streets.”
“Sure you can.”
“No, you can’t.”
“Yes, you can.”
“The sky’s just a crack between those buildings…you can’t see it properly!”
“There’s a terrace here. The roof. A rooftop terrace.” Andrei surprises Ollie and me both by speaking, and we spin around to see him. He’s smiling, but his eyes are thin and unreadable.
“Really?” Ollie asks, his voice hopeful and childlike.
“Yeah. The stars as a ceiling. Just the sky.”
Ollie nods and tries to stand. His sneakers––the kind a parent buys for a teenage son––slide against the scuffed red floor tiles and he falls back onto his chair with a puff of dust. I lift him to his feet once again. “Sure,” I say. “I want to smoke anyway.”
Andrei is already on his feet and wordlessly sweeps an arm out toward the dark corridor past the lobby. He has his textbook––recovered from the lobby? Had he just left it here earlier expecting to find it again, that no one would have moved it?––under his other arm. He twists on a heel and walks into the dark, the shadows enveloping him until Ollie and I catch up.
The lights here turn off automatically every ten minutes until you feel around for the scattered light switches hiding in the peeling wallpaper. Andrei doesn’t hit the lights when we get to the narrow stairwell leading indeterminately upward, so I do, which only illuminates the first flight of steps. We ascend without speaking. Ollie’s still sniffling a bit, his elbow digging into my side as I try to support him. With each half floor climbed, we pass a different untelling hallway, darkened breakfast nook, shadowy alcove, closed door. There are no signs of life in the building, as if all its other temporary residents packed up and left while we were gone. There’s a moment where I think I see something undulating in the dark and my heart catches in my throat, but it’s just the hem of Andrei’s coat.
We reach the landing of the top floor. The stairs form a dizzying window looking all the way down to the first. There are a few shut bedroom doors and one glass one, the one Andrei holds open for us. We step out onto the hostel’s tiny rooftop terrace, a pleasant-enough patio with chairs, a few tables, string lights draped from the doorway to the start of the next building over, a few metal ash trays, and the whole night sky above. There aren’t any clouds, so we really do have a ceiling of stars. There is no moon.
We sit down. I dig in my pocket for a lighter and the pack of cheap cigarettes I bought at the tabacchi around the corner earlier in the day. I carefully slide one out, treating it as a luxury good, special because it is European. I turn away from Ollie and Andrei to light up and get lost for a while just staring up at the stars and my own clouds of smoke, my head spinning but in a way that makes the stars dance and shine brighter.
By the time I look back at my companions, Ollie must have fallen asleep—slumped in his chair, his head tilted back, mouth slightly open, forearm resting on the table with his palm facing the sky and his shirt sleeve rolled all the way up like he’s about to have his blood drawn. Andrei has his textbook perched open on the table to the anatomy of the human arm and uses a finger like a scalpel to trace lines on Ollie’s forearm. The arm in the book is all red muscle and tendons, as if its skin has been peeled off. Is that how Andrei imagines him now––dissected?
“What are you doing?”
Andrei looks up from Ollie’s arm and over to me. He smiles. He says nothing. His eyes, again: dark, thin like he’s pondering something I’m not allowed to know, cold.
“Where are you from?” I try.
That same expression. “Romania.”
“Really?”
That same expression. “No.”
“Do you actually study medicine?”
Andrei gestures to his textbook. “What does it look like I do?” He goes back to feeling Ollie’s arm, now with both hands, searching for something, prodding. Ollie doesn’t stir. My eyelids are heavy. My vision churns.
“I think I want to leave,” I say.
“Yes.”
“I think I want to go to sleep.”
“Yes.”
“You heading off to bed now too?”
Andrei’s eyes drift back to Ollie. “No.”
“Do you know where he’s staying? We should take him back to his room.” I’m worried for Ollie, worried to leave him here with Andrei. Is he breathing?
“I’ll come back for him,” Andrei says. He marks a curt line on Ollie’s wrist with a nail like an invisible incision and stands up. Ollie’s arm rocks on the table where he left it. “I’ll take you to yours now.”
Dread falls on me like a piano: heavy, sudden, complete. I shudder–––from the drinks? The chill air? Andrei?–––and I struggle to stand because my knees are working to betray me.
“You don’t have to…” I say, but he already has a firm palm on my back and leads me to the glass door. I glance back at Ollie one more time: the terrace lights act as a spotlight on his pale face. Ghostly. He is only sleeping. He wears the slightest smile on his lips. The door shuts, and I face the stairs. “Third floor.”
As promised, Andrei walks me to my door. I don’t look him in the face the whole time, scared of his eyes, but I can hear his footsteps stalk me the whole walk down. I don’t turn the lights on either. I don’t want to see. “You didn’t have to come to dinner,” he says.
What had I trespassed upon? What plot of his have I haplessly inserted myself into? “I was hungry.”
“That’s okay. Unlock it. Use your key.”
I unlock the door, but it takes a whole minute of turning my key in the tarnished knob back and forth, shimmying it, jimmying it, pushing it hard to the right, hard to the left. I’m desperate near the end as one minute seems to stretch out an hour, so aware of Andrei standing right behind my left shoulder, waiting, until I finally get it to click. The door opens into my dark room, and still I do not hit the lights. I don’t want to see his face.
But I have to. I dart into the room and lean an arm on the edge of the door and my head on the doorjamb. Blocking this man who has done me no wrong. Yet. I see the outline of his head and the indents of his facial features in the dark, but not much else. It is quiet.
“Thanks,” I say. “I’m here.”
“Yes.” I don’t have to see him to imagine his smile, his eyes exactly the same boring deep into mine. “You’re a nice person.”
I’m baffled and drowsy and I say “Thanks,” once again. “Andrei?”
“Yes?” He’s moved away a bit, back toward the stairs. He’s leaving me. Letting me go. Letting me go free.
“Is that your real name?”
He laughs, something that strikes me as so unusual it must be the first time he’s done it all night. Yes. It must be the first time.
“Is it?”
He doesn’t answer. His footsteps against the stairs leading back up to the terrace echo against the hostel’s shadowed walls. Claustrophobic staring out at the empty corridor, I shut the door.
Elena Eiss paints a foreboding picture of Palermo for the Nassau Weekly. Maybe skip it and go straight to Naples next time?