The Scapegoat Page 8

  On his way he walked by Agia Sophia, where he and Teta had gotten married. Back then, Evthalia couldn’t comprehend how a born-and-bred Thessalonian could want to get married anywhere else, and not because it’s in fashion these days, she’d tried to admonish the couple, but because it’s the heart of the city, the place where so much of its history has taken place, she said, gathering steam. The young couple didn’t want to argue with her—Teta and Tasos, the inseparable Ts, she used to tease them. Tasos had floated the idea of a civil ceremony, which was roundly rejected on the basis of very few actual arguments. It wouldn’t bother you to have a right-wing mayor officiate at your wedding? Evthalia asked innocently. She herself had voted for the man, but she knew perfectly well what would cut her future son-in-law to the quick. And Tasos, who considered all decisions about the wedding minor details and didn’t have time to waste on skirmishes, showed up in the historic churchyard in a salmon-colored jacket and a green satin tie that he’d picked out himself, very proud of his taste. Teta smiled. She liked his wild side, how easily he got fired up, how he squeezed her hand when they were out walking and now at the church as well, the fact that he didn’t give a damn about etiquette and always let his own flag fly.

  —You’re marrying a firebrand, Evthalia warned her with a smile.

  —That’s part of his charm, replied Teta, who may have seemed like an obedient daughter but always managed to get her way in the end. It was a quality Evthalia admired, though she would never admit it. She had always respected people with strong personalities. People who knew the rules and were willing to accept the consequences of their actions. Anastasios Georgiou unquestionably belonged to that category. If Evthalia had ever had him as a student, he would have been her favorite. True to his word yet mildly intractable. Diligent yet full of questions. Captain Commotion, but without a trace of cockiness.

  On their wedding day they had both been radiant with joy, and Evthalia worried that so much happiness might fall and crush them somehow. She decided to light an expensive candle at the entryway to the church, just in case, to ward off the evil eye.

  Now, at that same entryway twenty years later, Tasos Georgiou slowed to a stop. Actually, at first he passed by hurriedly, but stopped a few steps farther on, wondering what that ball of something had been, rolled up on the floor of the alcove where the candles were, by the gate to the churchyard.

  Then he heard the cry.

  For a moment the bustle on the square stopped. Everyone froze: the koulouri man, mothers with kids, passersby laden with bags, Chinese street vendors with their heavy loads.

  It was like the cry of a large animal—a wild beast, perhaps—slowly dying. But there was no forest here, no stand of trees, no savannah. The place stank of car exhaust; vast swathes of cement swallowed up everything in sight. Impossible, he thought, I must have imagined it. A minute later the cry was repeated, deeper, as if someone were disemboweling the beast using an iron winch and tossing its guts onto the sidewalk. Georgiou turned around to look.

  It was Fendi, a foreigner, a de facto errand-boy whom the regulars at the cafés on the square treated to a coffee every so often; passersby would sometimes buy him a koulouri. Always on their own initiative, since he was ashamed to ask. And now he was flailing on the ground in front of the brass tray of lighted votive candles in the alcove at the churchyard gate. He pounded his head on the cement, howling in despair.

  He had no words left, or hopes, or friends.

  Georgiou felt ashamed. Ashamed of himself, of the luxury of his worries, which only moments earlier had seemed to be piled mountain-high, and of his cowardice. He watched but didn’t move any closer. People were passing by, others were watching the scene, smoking, chewing tiropitas. One little kid started to run toward Fendi, but his mother grabbed him by the coat—that was not a sight for a child, so she pulled him back and they continued on their way.

  Georgiou took a step forward, then stopped. It seemed wrong, offensive somehow, for him to touch Fendi on the shoulder—after all, he had nothing to say, all the words in his head rang false. Better for him to just keep walking. But that didn’t seem right, either, that’s not the kind of person he was, he’d fought for so many things in his life, written articles full of fire, taken part in fierce protests. He stood for a moment, unable to decide. Then he walked over, left a twenty-euro bill on the sidewalk at Fendi’s knees, and quickly walked away.

  But he was dogged by that deep sense of shame. Shame for having too few words and too much money, shame that he couldn’t reach out to touch the man, shame, shame, shame.

  He turned into Pavlos Melas Street to seek shelter. He remembered going out for a walk years ago with Minas, who couldn’t have been more than three at the time. They were headed down Agia Sophia Street. Minas was walking ahead, refusing to let his father hold his hand, and gazing in amazement at everything around him. Everything seemed entirely new: the bitter orange trees, the cars, bottle caps on the ground. A gypsy woman lying on a piece of cardboard mumbled prayers mixed with curses. She’d pulled up her skirts and her dark thighs were there for all to see, rotten flesh, crooked legs, turned-in ankles, a hard, yellow crust over her toenails. A little farther on a blind man was sitting on a plastic bag, playing a pipe. Minas froze, staring.

  —What do they want, Dad? he asked.

  —Money, Georgiou answered, but that didn’t satisfy his son.

  —You have money, why don’t you give them some?

  The question was logical enough. He tried to explain his reasoning patiently and calmly, as he’d seen Teta do any number of times when Minas barraged her with questions. He quickly realized that his explanations were confusing the child even more—how could they not, since he was only stringing phrases together? In the end he gave up. They might be lying, he heard himself say, they might have even more money than we do, and Minas finally stopped asking.

  When Minas was little, he used to observe the adults around him with an unblinking eye. He listened in on everything they said behind closed doors. He played alone in his room, with Playmobil and Legos, knights, dragons, and pirates. He would leave notes on the fridge for his mother to read and answer in writing—it had to be in writing, in a box he would draw in the bottom right corner of the page, with the heading Mom’s Answer in careful letters.

  Teta was endlessly proud of her only child, whom she raised according to the rules she herself had learned as a child. She was constantly worrying, she always found something to agonize over: how Minas would drift off into a world of his own, lost in thought, and she couldn’t tell if those thoughts were happy or sad. Or how he avoided kids his own age and sought out the company of adults, in whose presence he was particularly eloquent and outgoing.

  —Don’t make mountains out of molehills, was Evthalia’s steady advice. The child is fine, it’s your own head that needs examining.

  But now that Minas had raised his banner of revolution, the ground had fallen away from beneath Teta’s feet. Apparently her obedient son wasn’t quite so obedient after all.

  —Don’t fight him, Evthalia advised.

  That’s when Teta exploded.

  —Sure, she shot back, that’s easy for you to say. We both know I was raised on prohibitions, by a mother who always had to get her way.

  Evthalia refused to discuss old wounds; she had no intention of revisiting decisions she had made decades earlier. But she didn’t protest: at her age she had learned to give way, to not waste energy on useless conflict but rather try and find a solution. This situation, though, seemed to have reached an impasse. Minas had dug in his heels and all Teta could do was tug at the leash.

  Recently Teta had begun to resign herself. You can’t live your son’s life for him, and you can’t make his decisions, her therapist admonished.

  Of course Teta thought Minas was the one who should be seeing a therapist, but he refused even to discuss anything “stupid,” a category that included therapists and their theories. Tasos and Evthalia both agreed with the boy’
s evaluation, but since they didn’t have anything better to suggest, they kept their mouths shut.

  Minas lived barricaded in his room. He rarely went out at night, rarely talked on the phone. He was plugged in at all times. Teta searched the Internet history on his computer a few times, but never discovered anything worth worrying about. An interview with Jacques Derrida about the instability of meaning and the tyranny of the easy answer (good lord), poems and paintings by Nikos Engonopoulos (lovely, but useless for a graduating senior who should be preparing for his exams), a virtual tour of Prague (poor thing, he’d been planning for that trip), and a statue of Justice dressed like a rock star, with hair extensions, a sword, and a dog collar (perish the thought).

  Teta didn’t feel great about spying on her son, but she also believed she was doing the right thing. Her therapist disagreed. What you did was wrong, he admonished, human relationships are built on trust, and trust is hard to regain once it’s lost. Teta didn’t take his chiding too seriously. The therapist based his judgments on books, while Teta based hers on experience. He had no children of his own, so who was he to tell her how to manage her son? She still went to see him regularly, and sought his advice about all kinds of things, but in the end she acted as she saw fit. Theories about mutual respect were all well and good, but she needed to know what she was up against.

  When she finally went to Minas’s school she was past seeking advice; what she needed was an oracle. But most of his teachers felt that there was nothing they could do, no matter how sympathetic they were to her son. No one who teaches the senior class has time to babysit parents. Teta knew that, of course—or rather, she imagined it: she may not have been a teacher herself, but after so many years as a mother she knew a thing or two about schools.

  It had been hard for Evthalia to accept her daughter’s decision not to become a teacher, a decision suddenly communicated to Evthalia together with the news of Teta’s pregnancy. Tasos and Teta knew that Evthalia wouldn’t lose her temper in front of a pregnant daughter. And indeed, Evthalia, as fierce as knives when it came to issues of professional dignity and financial independence, accepted the blow without a single comment and held out her arms to the couple. Later, of course, when the dust had settled, she took her daughter aside.

  Yes, she understood that Tasos’s job was a demanding one, with no set schedule or real days off, and yes, he made enough for them to raise a child on, particularly since they weren’t the type to indulge in useless luxuries—but, Teta, honey, Evthalia said sweetly, though she was fuming on the inside, is that why I sent you to university, so you could shut yourself up in the house and raise a child? She wanted to say his child, but at the last minute she held back, a fact for which she silently congratulated herself. Evthalia might not have been the sort of feminist who went around with hairy legs and sensible shoes, and she certainly hadn’t burned any bras, but she made no bones about raising her voice and giving people a piece of her mind when the situation called for it. She hadn’t quit her job to raise Teta, though her husband had tried to insist on it. Back in those days women were homemakers, each confined to her own tiny realm. Evthalia, however, wanted a salary of her own, so she wouldn’t have to ask for money to have a dress made. And when her husband died young and she received his first miserable pension check in the mail, she went to his grave, and instead of crying like all the other widows dressed head to toe in black, she told him, See, if I’d listened to you, I’d be begging in the streets, and washed his gravestone with a deep sense of vindication.

  As the years passed Evthalia started to wear the pants that her husband had forbidden. She felt beholden to no one, and particularly not to the school inspectors who visited the school regularly and always gave the widow disapproving looks. She stood her ground, though, since at the end of the day she worked as hard as ten men.

  —A pair of pants is the most modest thing a woman can wear, she told the principal assigned to the school during the junta, a conservative theologian who dared to comment on her choice of attire. You can bend over as far as you want without worrying that someone might see your underwear, or even a thigh.

  The theologian let the conversation die there.

  Evthalia was the last of her cohort to retire. She left the school only when she had no other choice. That might have explained why it was so difficult for her to comprehend her daughter’s decision to become a housewife, no matter how hard Teta tried to dress it up with various theories.

  —A woman with a literature degree shut up within the four walls of a kitchen, she hadn’t been able to restrain herself from saying, just once, years ago.

  Teta refused to let it slide.

  —At least I’ll be home for my child, I’ll be there to watch him grow up.

  Evthalia silently accepted the jibe. Teta later apologized, but what had been said couldn’t be unsaid. Even if it was unfair, entirely unfair, in Evthalia’s estimation, Teta’s words had rung like a bell in her mother’s head ever since, marking with absolute precision how far Evthalia could go, how much she could say, and where she should take care to stop.

  Thus it was that Teta devoted all her time and energy to Minas. The willful solitude of her only child had become something of a family joke. Teta liked to recount with feigned worry and thinly disguised pride a scene that had taken place at the playground. Minas, still a toddler, found a kid his age playing in the sandbox and sat down beside him, but instead of grabbing a bucket and shovel, tried to strike up a conversation:

  —Do you like Miró? He’s my favorite painter.

  The other kid promptly picked up his toys and left, not bothering to respond.

  Teta had panicked. Minas had no social skills, she fretted to Evthalia.

  —Is that something people are talking about these days? the grandmother asked, and her daughter launched into a recitation from the parenting manuals she’d been reading.

  While her child might have known to use the second person plural for polite speech, there were all sorts of things most people considered self-evident about which he had no idea. The guy at the kiosk, the woman at the bakery, and the man at the corner store all adored him, and showered her with compliments about how fast he was growing and how bright he was. But they belonged to the protected realm of the adult world; they wouldn’t dream of tormenting a child with mean-spirited teasing. Teta was terrified of the day when Minas would enter kindergarten. She went to meet the kindergarten teacher and told her that she was particularly concerned about her child’s socialization.

  —He’s been raised among adults, she confided.

  The teacher smiled. Yet another spoiled only child.

  In the end, though, Minas was fairly easy-going, or at least that’s how it seemed from the outside and from a distance. But Teta’s antennas were always raised. She sensed that Minas was only mimicking behaviors, imitating a child’s whining or funny faces or clumsy gestures, repeating silly phrases. He was pretending to be what he was supposed to be.

  The adults in his life fell for his routine, but what did they know? There was no fooling the other kids, who could tell right away that something wasn’t quite right with Minas, that he wasn’t normal. He seemed friendly and outgoing, made jokes, pulled pranks. And yet he didn’t fit in, didn’t conform—that’s what they would have said if they had known the word. But they didn’t, so the issue remained undefined, more of a feeling, a slight breeze that followed Minas around and made the other kids uncomfortable. Time passed and they got used to his strangeness. An unofficial truce developed, though only after plenty of conflict and tears on both sides. Minas wasn’t one to hang back. He met confrontation head-on: he knew that was the only way to resolve things, otherwise the fools just made things worse for you. So when the class bully threw his penmanship book in the trash, a green notebook with twenty-five straight pages bearing the teacher’s Bravo! at the top, Minas lost his cool. He glared at the perpetrator like a bull staring down a bullfighter, grinding his teeth the way Tasos did when things we
ren’t going well at work, and suddenly made a beeline for the other kid.

  —You’re a moron.

  Words didn’t frighten the bully, but then words are superfluous when the adrenaline is pumping through a room full of twenty-seven preteens. And so words were followed by deeds. They threw a few awkward jabs. Minas didn’t know how to fight, but he was a big kid. His opponent, a nervous little runt, started landing kicks wherever he could. Minas let loose with a backhanded blow that half missed its mark, but the other half got the job done.