The Scapegoat (19 page)

Grandma’s house is on Prasakaki Street, just north of Agia Sophia. It used to have a view of the sea, too—if you pressed up against the balcony railing and twisted your head just right. Now it looks into the bedrooms across the way. Dad calls it
seventh heaven
, because it’s on the seventh floor. But to this day Mom can’t stay in that apartment for longer than an hour. The walls start to close in on her. She says it all the time, but she can’t understand that I feel exactly the same way about our house. Our house has no oxygen. Sometimes I can’t breathe, just sitting there in the living room.

—Welcome, the old man says. Elena, do we have anything to treat the kids to?

Evelina looked at him in surprise. In all those years her grandfather hadn’t treated her to so much as a glass of water. Elena brought us orangeade and slices of tsoureki.

The old man was one of the ones who’d been keeping tabs on the sit-in, which gave us something to talk about. He knew more than we did about what was happening in the schoolyard. We spent seven minutes on boring observations. Then I lost patience and got to the point.

—Mr. Dinopoulos, would you mind if I recorded our conversation? I asked as I searched the menu on my cell phone. I knew it had a function for digital recording, I’d just never needed it until now.

—I want to see Evthalia.

Evelina started to say something. I put my hand on her knee to stop her, pushing the button to start the recording.

—Really, young man, did you think I’d talk to you without some kind of exchange? At my age I enjoy the ultimate luxury of being beholden to no one. Though I don’t mind making other people beholden to me, he added slyly.

—That’s precisely what I’m counting on.

—Pretty big for your britches, aren’t you? Just like her.

—Who?

—Evthalia. She always had to have the last word.

I smiled. That was Grandma, all right.

—Well? Will you bring her to see me? he insisted.

—I accept your terms.

The old Methuselah smiled. He leaned his head back on his armchair and squinted against the light.

—Bring that thing closer, he ordered. If we’re going to do this, let’s do it right. I don’t want her complaining afterward that I tricked you. If she decides to give me a piece of her mind, not even God himself can save me.

THROUGH OTHER EYES

On the first day of the occupation, the first-years tossed a plastic bottle over the schoolyard wall. It was a half-empty bottle of water—not a big deal, you might say. It would burst on the sidewalk outside and that would be that. But this bottle happened to fall on the head of a passerby, a tourist, a German philhellene of the old breed, one of those who think the ancient Greeks invented the universe. The bottle smacked him right in the middle of his bald spot. It took the dazed German a few minutes to figure out what had happened. And when he did, he made a beeline for the school, enraged.

The German tourist was not mentally prepared for the sight of a sit-in at a public educational institution. He was obviously suffering from culture shock. And his English, while good, got him nowhere in terms of comprehending the situation. The students were all talking at once, the desks had been dragged into messy rows by the entrance. The German had an open mind, or so he liked to think, but the disorder before him was more than he could understand. It was incomprehensible to him that adult teachers had allowed a bunch of crazed teenagers to occupy a public space. It was even more incomprehensible that the policemen he’d seen right down the street were making no move to intervene. The students’ lack of fear made an impression on him. They acted without any consideration for what the consequences might be. They had no idea what punishment even meant.

These were the thoughts he tried to communicate to the principal, who himself had only a Lower Proficiency in English, and from decades earlier, meaning that he had a sum total of about two hundred words of English at his disposal. The principal immediately sent for Soukiouroglou. When everyone else was drowning in a spoonful of water, Soukiouroglou always found a way out. True, the principal thought he was antisocial, bad luck,
and a snob, and generally kept him at arm’s length. Yet he didn’t hesitate to call on him when circumstances demanded.

Soukiouroglou and the German shook hands and started to talk. Soukiouroglou never boasted about his language skills, the way some of the jokers on the faculty did. The principal had even gotten annoyed with stubborn, mule-headed Soukiouroglou for not turning in a résumé, as he’d asked all the school’s personnel to do. What he really wanted was a list of skills that would make it easier for him to distribute extracurricular responsibilities, so he could get them all running around working on projects funded by the European Union, making him look good in the eyes of his superiors—or so his adversaries said behind his back. At any rate, most teachers turned in their résumés as he had requested. These were tricky times, and no one was willing to risk his job.

Soukiouroglou, however, wanted nothing to do with it.

—I choose not to be judged by you. I’ve been judged enough in my life, he said, and walked off.

The principal decided not to push the issue. It was a decision he had congratulated himself on ever since. He’d heard about Soukiouroglou long before he assumed duties as the principal of this school.
A good civil servant
, that’s what they told him at the Ministry. Some might have considered that an insult, or at least an ironic put-down. For most, being a civil servant meant leading a lazy life of responsible irresponsibility, sitting pretty without having to work all that hard. People offered anecdotal evidence of the worst kinds of abuses, and came to easily digested conclusions.

The civil war between the public and private sectors had been simmering for years. Now that belts were being tightened all over, the situation had erupted into open conflict. These days it was each man for himself, all against all. The first in the crosshairs were the teachers and the university professors. Furious parents and journalists who thought they had the truth in their pockets
made sarcastic remarks about the easy hours and long vacations. None of those people really knew what it meant to be a teacher. They just found a scapegoat and loaded it up.

A few days earlier one mother had come to the school to try and get her child’s absences excused. She had on a T-shirt printed with the words,
THREE REASONS I WANT TO BE A TEACHER: JUNE, JULY, AND AUGUST
. While this fine specimen of motherhood had her back turned, Soukiouroglou said, loud enough that she would hear:

—Some parents are as uncultured as their children. They have plenty of time to paint their nails, but never manage to make it to parent-teacher night. They think the school is there to babysit their children. Meanwhile, they settle in at the hair salon and boast about how they could do the job better. But if you threw them into a classroom for even five minutes, they’d put down their revolutionary banners and run the other way as fast as they could. They can’t even manage their own kids, so how could they ever control an entire class of them?

The mother blushed and turned to leave. The previous year, when her child had been in Soukiouroglou’s class, he asked her to come to the school eight separate times. She was always busy. Her child’s situation was discussed at faculty meetings, and they even ordered an external review of the case, but no solution was ever settled upon. The mother was always absent, never had time to talk to the school psychologist, kept offering excuses and putting up obstacles. At the end of the day, she just wanted the experts to deal with her child. People with degrees who were paid for their time and effort. People whose job it was to shape children’s souls.

In other words, the mother palmed her problem off on the child’s teachers. She expected a solution to drop down from the sky, without her lifting a finger. Her attitude was understandable—even excusable. Most teachers were used to listening patiently to despairing parents singing sad songs about their lot.
Soukiouroglou went a step further: he tackled the problem. He tried to move forward toward a solution.

A good civil servant
. It wasn’t ironic, and it wasn’t an insult. What it meant was, a person who assumed responsibility. Who finished the job on time. Who gave for free what others sold at a high price. Who taught his class with intellectual propriety and sound pedagogical methods. Students at the school—or rather, their parents—paid out the nose to evening cram schools for services the school provided for free during the day. Soukiouroglou tried to make his students realize how nonsensical that was. Some of them were convinced. They stopped going to cram schools, quit their private lessons, and studied under his tutelage. And in the end they got into university, just like the rest. They saved time and money. Their brains didn’t rot from too many worksheets and mnemonic devices.

The principal never found out what Soukiouroglou said to the German tourist on that fateful first day of the sit-in. The foreigner smiled, jotted down some notes, and headed off with a clearly marked map, courtesy of Soukiouroglou, who went back to the teachers’ office, and to the task of tallying student absences.

Everyone came to the concert. Spiros greeted them at the main entrance, handing out a photocopied program along with a little slip of paper printed with slogans. They had spent all afternoon trying to decide what to write, since they wanted their school to make a good impression. At some point Spiros realized that talking wasn’t going to get them anywhere, threw democratic procedure out the window, and just wrote what he wanted.

The band was tuning up in the schoolyard, testing the distortion. The neighbors were in despair, since they could tell it was gearing up to be a long night. None of the fifty-somethings sitting on the surrounding balconies had any desire to listen to the songs of enraged adolescents late into the night—after all, music
had died with their youth. The real revolution had taken place decades ago—or so they believed, these adults who had dedicated years of their lives to demonstrations and occupations. The political activities of their children struck them as a washed-out repetition of an earlier era, which they themselves had lived through in its full glory: the era when they had been building a world, which they’d now cut and sown to their measurements.

Of course they recognized these students’ need to raise fists and banners, to blow off some steam with a slogan or two. But they also thought these underage revolutionaries required supervision and guidance—that it was their responsibility to impart their knowledge and experience, to instruct their children in the ways of civil disobedience.

And then there were other parents whose lives revolved primarily around the workplace, where they tried to be as tractable as they could, and who shuddered at their opponents’ views. Thus parents and students alike split into two camps: those who believed that an occupation could teach an important political lesson, and those who considered the loss of class hours a serious obstacle to the students’ progress.

A school has a duty to remain open regardless of circumstances; its job is to weave a protective cocoon of knowledge and understanding, particularly in difficult times
, proclaimed those who supported the rule of law. Whereas experienced revolutionaries and unionists of various stripes laughed in the face of such arguments and gave their all to the struggle.

The students tried their hand at the rhetoric of occupation. Some parents disparaged it as empty jabbering, but their kids didn’t care. They were just glad to have broken the deadly routine of classes. They felt they had assumed an important role, and a kind of power, particularly those who were making decisions on behalf of others—Spiros, for instance. He blurted out whatever he was thinking without taking the time to find the proper words. He loved the applause, fed off of his classmates’ approval.
He suddenly felt that he wasn’t the school pariah anymore, the awful speller, diagnosed with dyslexia by the school psychologist. Now he was Spiros from the occupation. The one who’d made the Facebook page for the concert.

Evelina couldn’t stand seeing that moron prancing around as if he were running the show. Taking initiative, making plans. Bringing others over to his side with the worst kind of demagoguery, and to top it all off with arguments articulated in terrible Greek. In her mind, it was high time he learned his lesson. So she shamed him publicly, in front of everyone, even the teachers. Meanwhile, she covered her bases by sabotaging him behind his back, too, with phone calls and secret agreements. It took time, but it worked: the occupation came to a peaceful end.

She had decided that she should definitely show up at the concert. She didn’t want to give way to her opponent so easily. She pulled on a pair of ripped jeans that showed some thigh and a black T-shirt. The outfit seemed simple, but it took her forty-five minutes in front of a mirror to settle on the details that would make the difference. What color bra she should wear, for instance, since it was an off-the-shoulder shirt that revealed one strap. The string on her thong needed to be discrete, a color that wouldn’t show even if she bent over. Clear lip gloss and mascara applied with a special brush, to make each eyelash stand out separately. Then she straightened her hair with a hair iron and set out, ready for battle.

Things in the schoolyard were in full swing. Spiros was running around, making sure everyone saw him. He was looking for Minas. He found him lying on a low wall, all alone. He had headphones on and was nodding to the rhythm; he seemed perfectly in tune with himself. Spiros was jealous of his indifference. He didn’t seem to care what other people thought, he wasn’t trying to make anyone like him.

Evelina didn’t understand that at all: she wanted everyone to love her. Whenever she picked up on even a whiff of dislike,
it threw her off completely. She may have seemed strong, but it was just her protective shell. And it shattered easily—or so her mother thought, who worried constantly about her daughter. Minas was of a different opinion. In his view, Evelina had surrounded herself with barbed wire, and wouldn’t let just anyone in. The other girls at school were always going on about lifelong friendships and nights out and summer vacations. Evelina went along with it all, yet remained encased in her coat of armor. She seemed outgoing and friendly, but she was made of steel.