The Scapegoat (13 page)

So Kyriakos could say what he liked about us ending up part of the suit-wearing proletariat.
Degree or no degree
, he would say,
we’re all the same, the same millstone grinds us all down
. Kyriakos could say plenty more along those lines, particularly when he got riled up. He mocked Crete, called her a
marquise
, sneered at her coiffed hair, at the way she pronounced legal phrases, with a calm distaste, as if they felt dirty in her mouth. Kyriakos was smarter than any of us. The law professors were always talking about the country kid who had come down from his village to study in the city and was at his books night and day.

The professors were charmed by his passion, but even more by the precision of his language, by his sound judgment and fine rhetoric. The students who came in second and third, right
behind him, claimed that his brilliant wordplay in the lecture hall only showed that he was a godless sophist. His teachers, who valued such rhetorical sleights-of-hand, thought it demonstrated his admirably wide base of knowledge.

Kyriakos did well in school, and after graduating, too. Soon enough he had become one of Crete’s kind, full of irony and witticisms. He bought an apartment in town for his parents and brought them down from the village. His mother stopped wearing her headscarf and robe. She blessed the marriage of her only son to Crete’s cousin Sofoula, a girl with a considerable dowry and ambitions for a wedding in the Metropolitan Church.

The day I went to find him, the newspapers were on the war path, and the whole city hummed with news of the murder. I made an appointment through the secretary at his office, a young woman who sat anxiously typing carbon-paper triplicates. Kyriakos welcomed me with a rehearsed smile.

He explained to me that it was impossible. Things weren’t as simple as they seemed.

—Caesar’s wife must be above suspicion.

—What’s that supposed to mean? I lashed out.

Kyriakos made a gesture with his hand. To him the conversation was pointless.

—He already confessed. The only thing anyone can do, perhaps, is to save your mother. Violeta, this is not a time for emotion. One and one make two. Open your eyes.

—Look at you, Kyriakos Lolos, a boy from the village, valedictorian of our class in 1937, the young man who gathered up crumbs from lunch and saved them for dinner, who studied by the light of borrowed candles, who used to say that guilt is the creation of circumstance. Look what’s become of you. My brother is innocent. I know it and you know it, too.

—Violeta, you’re not being logical.

—Logic isn’t always the best advisor. Aren’t you the one who used to say that? That the hegemony of logic is responsible for some of the most fundamental misunderstandings?

—I wish I could help, Violeta. But your brother’s case has already been tried.

—It’s been tried outside the courts. That’s what you’re telling me.

Kyriakos didn’t breathe another word. It was hard even for him to say to my face what anyone with eyes in his head could see.

KYRIA MARIA GRIS, MOTHER OF MANOLIS

It was dark as tar, rainy weather
.

When they burst into my house to turn the place upside-down, I had just lain down with my feet propped against the wall. My feet were swollen something awful, my knees had been killing me since morning. I heard footsteps and knew. I ran to the door. I didn’t care about the pain or anything.

A mother’s curse never fails.

May a bereaved mother never cross your path
, the old women in Trabzon used to say.
She’ll burn up your joy, poison your day
.

Those men weren’t men, they were mules. Pigs.

—Hey! Don’t you have mothers of your own? I shouted, but they’d come there to get a job done.

Which is to say, not even a troop of janissaries could have stopped them, much less pleading and tears.

They turned the whole house upside-down. They even searched the lamp in front of my icons. They pawed the girls’ nightgowns, flipped through our books, read all our papers. They found the one about Savvas.

—One son a hero, the other a traitor, they said.

Evgnosia put her hand over my mouth.

—Don’t say a thing, Mother. Our silence will protect Manolis.

But there was no way of hushing Violeta. She couldn’t abide injustice. Her head had swelled at the university, she’d read the laws. She knew right from wrong, not the way we learn it at home, but how it’s written in books.

—You have no right, you have no proof, she shouted in their faces.

They paid her no heed at all. They asked their questions, I answered. They made me write a paper and sign it. I told them I never went to school, I might make mistakes, Violeta was the one in our house who had studied.

—Don’t worry, ma’am, said a young man standing off to one side, just write the words and don’t worry about that.

When they asked me to come with them, that’s when my legs started hurting again. In all the commotion I’d forgotten the pain. My mother was right when she used to say, you can bear any pain if you have other worries on your mind.

I’m bearing, Mother. I’m bearing.

We never had anything to do with the police, we aren’t communists. We believe in Christ. Later on, at the trial, they said all kinds of things. They said we collaborated with the Reds. My boy joined the Party, it’s true. He needed work. Do you think he had many offers to choose from? But they kicked him out, they figured out fast enough that he wasn’t one of them. I tried to cheer him up, told him it was better to keep his distance. He would
find another job, he was good at whatever he tried. When anyone called, he ran to help.

I’d had my dream. I never dream anything significant, I fall in bed like a log and sleep like a log until morning. But two days before my name day, all my dead came to see me in my sleep. They crowded in on all sides. My dead babies wrapped in blankets, fresh out of my belly, with the eyes of the very old. Eyes that know life is an uphill battle. My mother, young, with a braid in her hair and a kerchief, in her best dress and an embroidered apron. My father in his burial clothes. My mother-in-law with the tin basin, the one I washed her feet in, and her wedding coins sewn to the chest of her dress. My husband Stathis with those thick eyebrows of his, and the mole on his forehead. Savvas with a starched white shirt hanging out of his pants.
Tuck that in, boy
, I shouted. He was so thin, with cheeks as yellow as kaseri cheese. All around were cousins and neighbors, nephews and distant uncles. They all stood there in a crowd, none of them said a word, all you could hear was an
mmmmmmm
, something like church, or a song.

—Why aren’t you talking? I asked them right to their faces. Say something! If you’ve gone to the trouble of rising from the earth to visit me, you can’t have all come here tonight for anything good.

I woke with them still on my mind.

I counted them and remembered them one by one, twenty-seven in all, more than the house could fit, if they’d actually come. I was angry with Savvas. The rest had been buried for years, they’d forgotten and been forgotten, I rarely mentioned them in my prayers—except for my mother, of course—but Savvas was everywhere I turned. His photograph, framed in the sitting room. My blessed child, there at every turn. I was standing in front of that photograph, ready to give him a piece of my mind, when Evgnosia called to me.

—Mother, come quick! The lamp broke.

The oil had spilled all over the good tablecloth, the embroidered one, which we used to decorate the table. Evgnosia crossed herself.

—Don’t worry, Mother, I’ll put some warm water and soap on it.

She scrubbed it and got the stain out. But a faint shadow remained. Evgnosia put a bottle on top so we could still enjoy the embroidery. Right there, on our good tablecloth, was where they had me write that statement. My letters wouldn’t lie flat, my hand trembled, and of course there was the cross-stitching underneath. Evgnosia made sure ink from the pen didn’t leak onto the cloth. The poor thing was afraid another stain would ruin the piece altogether. Those were the kinds of worries we had. Back then. Before the sky fell on our heads.

Kyrios Tzitzilis wanted to be done with the case, he didn’t like that we were causing him trouble. He smiled when I came in.

—Your Manolis is a good boy, Kyra-Maria, but too quiet. He’s not saying what we want him to.

—What is it you want him to say? I asked.

—We want him to tell us about the communists, about his friends. To admit what he’s done, so we can all go home.

What had he done? That was the trouble: they wouldn’t tell me, no matter how many times I swore in the name of the Virgin Mary and her holy son that my Manolis had no truck with communists, that we were godly people, Greeks of the greater Greece, refugees chased down from the Pontus, but Greeks to the marrow of our bones.

—Fine, fine, Tzitzilis nodded, and kept asking what he’d already asked.

When he saw me rubbing my legs, since it was hot outside and they had swollen something awful,
Get up, kyra
, he ordered,
you’re going to climb the stairs
.

A Turk might have cut my legs off right there, but he wouldn’t have put me through that torture.

Forty-three stairs, up and down.

Again. And again. All day.

I didn’t care about the pain. Pain you can bear. You keep saying, now I’ll surely die, but it keeps getting worse and you keep on living.

When your fate has been written, even God abandons you.

O Virgin Mary, who saw your son on the cross, you understand. You understand but say nothing. You won’t come down from your throne to save a body. Your eyes may fill with tears, but you offer no shelter.

They opened the door at the bottom of the stairs and I saw my child lying in blood. As if dead, tossed on the cement floor.

—You have no God, I shouted at them, no mother gave birth to you. May you live with my curse, and die unmourned and unforgiven. May you see all I’ve seen and worse.

I dragged my foot down the stairs, I grabbed the left one, which hurt more, between both hands and pulled. My foot caught on the railing and I tumbled down the stairs, my knees were bruised but what did I care, it was just flesh, flesh and bone, and mine, not my child’s, I could tear myself to shreds and never care, as long as I got to where he was.

—Don’t worry, ma’am, a tall young man said politely, stepping between us. The best doctors will take care of your Manolis. He fell down the stairs, like you.

He waved his hand and they closed the door, closed it before
I could see him from up close. And they paid no heed to my pleading, all the tears in the world couldn’t reach their hearts. They stood there in front of the door, men with no ears and no eyes. They knew no pity.

The young man came over, put his hands under my arms and held me up.

—Come, ma’am, and sign the paper. For Manolis’s sake.

THROUGH OTHER EYES

When they brought Gris before the district attorney to sign his confession, he couldn’t even hold a pen. He kept sliding down on the chair. A policeman wrapped his hand around Gris’s fingers and helped with the signature, to speed things along.

In that policeman’s opinion, the American marshals, the Greek military officers, the government ministers, and the guys from Security all owed a moment of silence to the young man who had withstood all he’d withstood for so many days, and had even dared to raise his voice. He’d spoken back to the Minister of Justice, who had made a special trip up from Athens in a hurry—always in a hurry—to close the case, telling Gris that if he would just confess,
he would be offering the greatest of services to the government. The country would honor and respect him, his name would go down in history as one of the great benefactors of the nation
. At first Gris just stood in his corner like a whipped dog, but in the end he couldn’t hold back:

—Sir, why don’t you ask your son to sacrifice himself? To have his name go down in history as a benefactor of the nation? My family has already paid a high enough price. I lost a brother in the war. My mother can’t bear to lose another child.

Look at the little half-pint
, thought the policeman who had been assigned to guard Gris, the same policeman who had lost the bet over how long he would last. The Minister let loose for a
while and then stormed out, slamming the door behind him, and Tzitzilis vowed to punish the prisoner’s audacity.

The interrogation methods of the head of the Security Police were infamous in the city. He made prisoners stand for hours on end, deprived them of sleep and water, beat them, hung them upside-down, applied electroshock to their genitals, administered his own special concoction (no one dared mention opium), injections (of calcium, they said), promises, lies, curses, and kicks.

Tzitzilis never imagined that it would require his entire arsenal to bring Gris to his knees. The little lizard seemed like a sensitive type, a man who did the right thing, a pen-pusher with family obligations that strangled any dreams or desires of his own. A widowed mother and two unmarried sisters could unman a chieftain, much less a reporter. Tzitzilis gave him two days at most. The policeman in charge of Gris was the first to bet on the boss—and two days later had already lost.

Tzitzilis promised the prisoner a passport and a ticket to Argentina, as the guys at the Ministry had advised him to. They wanted to close the case as soon as possible, to get their hands on the proper confessions and signatures, to shut the journalists up. To put an end to the rumors once and for all.