The Scapegoat (10 page)

What I’m trying to do with these sources reminds me of Evelina reading that poem. I’m not studying the events, I’m looking for easy connections between them, to get it over with. I’m not letting them speak, I’m trying to speak for them. If Dad had ears to hear, I’d tell him that journalism does exactly the same thing, even if it doesn’t like to think so. It takes events and wraps them up in its own voice. I already know what his objections would be. In our conversations he steamrolls me every time. He knows how to argue. I always think of what I want to say too late, when he’s already left the room.

I don’t know what Souk got me mixed up in, or if I’ll ever figure it out. I’ve stuck Post-its with the names of the major players all over the walls of my room, and a photograph of Gris over my bed. Tall and pale on the first day of the trial.

—Who’s that scarecrow you’ve got on your wall? Mom asked
when she came in to clean. When I told her who it was and what happened to him, her response was:

—They burned his youth in a single night.

THROUGH OTHER EYES

Tasos Georgiou glanced at the slogan on the wall and smiled. For days he’d been walking into the newspaper building without noticing anything, he, a man who always claimed that nothing escaped him, not even a blink of his colleagues’ eyes. It had been a month since he’d joked around with the others, he just went straight to his office, shut the door, and started making calls.

—It’s a tough time for the boss, said the staff reporters, his “guys,” who’d learned most of what they knew from him, on the job.

They’d heard the rumors, they knew how bad the numbers were, and they were all riddled with worry. Whispered conversations in the halls centered around furloughs and salary reductions, and no one had a comforting word to say to anyone. The atmosphere at work was poisonous. No more goofing around, or workplace flirtations, or smiles for no reason. Every now and then someone would groan, it just slipped out before they could choke it back.

No one felt like doing anything. The uncertainty dragged on for days, until the days became weeks. The rumors infected everything, and none of them were ever confirmed. The girls in accounting stopped buying new lipstick. They used sample moisturizers from department stores and waited for the bomb to drop.

Georgiou wasn’t sleeping well and suffered relentless headaches. Conversations with his superiors were excruciating. He
was constantly weighing and calculating, trying to figure out which would be the smallest sacrifice.

—Ask your staff, suggested a veteran editor he knew in Athens who was an expert at spreading strife and breaking up alliances. They might prefer if you fired some of them. That way the rest would get to keep their jobs.

He wouldn’t hear of it. He knew them all by their first names, knew their wives and children. Sure, there were some lazy guys who got away with murder, who spent all day on the phone or taking cigarette breaks, but he couldn’t just send them packing. He wouldn’t take responsibility for that crime.

—Only the dead don’t go to work, that’s how I was raised, he cut off one guy, a specialist at sick leave, who tried to call in with a cold. He dragged the lazy bum into the office to work on a piece he’d emailed in, hoping the others would fix it up.

Georgiou barked, sure, but he had no intention of biting. When the publisher called a meeting with the staff, he sat on the latter’s side of the room, so it would be perfectly clear whose side he was on. The balance sheets were presented and the numbers shut people up, there was no arguing with the facts. The business side of things hadn’t been going well for a while. The publisher didn’t have much to add. He proposed a forty-percent reduction in wages. The staff accepted twenty percent. The union was pleased with the compromise, the staff relieved that the worst had been avoided.

The publisher wasn’t one to waste words. He was a good guy, all things considered. Haggling with him wasn’t an unpleasant affair: the necessary dirty work happened in a fairly above-board manner, he wasn’t overly greedy for profits, he knew how to be flexible while still getting his way in the end. He pulled strings behind closed doors. He knew how to compromise and how to form coalitions. He was corrupt, of course—how could he not be?—but he would admit it readily enough, with a knowing smile, if you asked, at least to the extent that he could talk about
such things.
Don’t interfere, you’ll mess up all my work
, his father’s accountant had told him when he first assumed responsibilities at the paper. He quickly figured out how private understandings got made, how fat envelopes traveled to and from ministers’ offices, how a person could ask for the most outrageous things and see them actually become a reality.

The publisher had already settled on a twenty-percent wage reduction, as per the advice of his unsmiling and extremely well-remunerated advisors, but proposed cuts twice as harsh so the union leaders would be able to boast that their multi-day negotiations had circumvented the worst.

It wasn’t fun for the journalists, of course—who likes to have money snatched from his pockets?—but they felt as if the sword that had been hanging over their heads had gone to threaten someone else instead. So they all breathed a collective sigh of relief and got back to work. They were perfectly aware that their good luck was temporary, but no one was making long-term plans these days anyway.

Georgiou went out to walk the city streets. He couldn’t stand being cooped up in the office anymore, his closed door made him claustrophobic. But he also didn’t want to leave it open, the way he used to. He planned on walking as far as Dimitris Gounaris Street, where the downward slope of the sidewalk calmed him, even if the place was filthy. He didn’t mind the muddy streets, the trash everywhere, the Pakistanis selling incense whose smell drove Evthalia crazy. All he saw was the sea at the end of the street, the glistening waves, the open horizon. That walk was his painkiller, his tranquilizer, the moments of soothing beauty he allowed himself when the going got tough. He had edited dozens of special issues about the city’s waterfront, he had talked with experts about its potential uses. He’d heard some crazy ideas and some interesting ones, ridiculous modernization schemes as well as more tasteful and sensible approaches. None of the architects brought in from elsewhere had any idea what the sea meant for
the city. On a design level, of course, they knew how to present their plans with the appropriate terminology. But on an everyday level, how many of those jacks-of-all-trades with their Ph.D.s from American universities knew what it meant to walk along Proxenos Koromilas Street, one block in from the waterfront, and see the sunset peeking in at every cross street? How many of them had spent their childhoods watching the sunlight dance over the waters of the Thermaic Gulf, at midday, through the windows of their schools? And how many had talent enough to make their architectural plans account for the particular gray of the city, on a rainy day, at the old port? A milky gray, with just a touch of watery blue at the end, a color all Thessalonians know—and though they might curse the dreariness of their city, if you dropped them down in the Maldives, sooner or later they would launch into endless comparisons and complaints about how exhausting all that sunshine was.

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.