The Scapegoat (2 page)

The copy machine is right outside the door to the teachers’
office, but I still couldn’t hear what they were saying. Soukiouroglou asked me to come see him, though, during the next break. One thing I’ll say about Souk, he’s got style. He doesn’t play good cop. He doesn’t even pretend to like us kids. And he doesn’t try to turn you into a replica of himself. Which is pretty rare for someone who spends his days at a high school.

—Your mom came to see me. I told her you don’t study.

I fixed my eyes on the floor.

—I also told her your grade in my class is still fairly respectable, thanks to the outside reading you do, even if your knowledge is often chaotic and disordered. But I don’t think you’d do well on the exams. She informed me of your decision not to take them.

Pause.

—Your mother objects, but right now that’s not our concern. Can you tell me why you’ve given up on trying to get into university?

—I just don’t want to go through all that, I answered with as much indifference as I could muster.

—You mean you can’t handle it.

—I’d rather jump off a balcony.

—Fine, he said, and turned to leave.

Days passed. Then, on Thursday morning, Soukiouroglou asked to see me again during third break, the long one that lasts a whole fifteen minutes. I felt like I was standing in a circle of snakes. I found him in the schoolyard, by the basketball hoop. He was surveying the passes, the dribbling, the three-pointers. He was bored and it showed. He nodded me over to where the others wouldn’t hear.

—Do you like our book? he asked.

I must have been staring at him like an idiot, because he did that thing he does with his eyes when he’s trying to keep himself from crushing someone.

—The book for our history class, he clarified.

—Oh.

—Well? Do you like it? he repeated the question.

—Am I supposed to? I asked.

With Souk you never know what the right answer is. It works well for him when he’s teaching, but outside of class it’s too much.

—Do you understand it? he asked.

—I don’t know, I usually can’t follow the thread from one sentence to the next.

—It’s not the most elegant text, Souk agreed, nodding.

I decided not to tell him about the hand. Every time I open the stupid book, a huge white hand appears and passes in front of my eyes. Within seconds it wipes away whatever I’ve just read.

—Listen, Georgiou, Souk went on. Since you’re not really interested in taking your exams this year, I’ve got another suggestion. Forget the book. Would you like to do some actual historical research?

Only Souk could come out with the craziest idea as if it were perfectly normal.

—There’s a case, well, there are lots of cases, but there’s one I think might suit your temperament. I propose you research it. I’ll give you whatever guidance you need in terms of bibliography. You’ll work on it for the rest of the quarter, and then present your findings at the end of February in front of an audience of teachers and fellow students. Your grade in my class will depend entirely on this project. In other countries, students are introduced to basic research methodology during the last two years of high school. They go to libraries, look at primary sources, learn how to cite scholarly works. They cultivate their own views. If we lived in Australia, you wouldn’t be staring at me right now as if I were an alien.

The bell rang. Souk told me to think it over. If I kept a diary, that day’s entry would read:
Friday, November 5, 2010. There is a god. His name is Souk and he works at our school
.

I used to be an excellent student. Used to as in up until last year. Mom was so proud. And even though Dad teased me about my “sissy” grades, he still photocopied my report cards to show to his colleagues at the newspaper. A row of perfect, sparkling twenties, every time.

Their blood froze when I told them about cram school.

—You’re wasting your money. You might as well hold on to it and give it to me at the end of the year, when I’ll really need it.

—What for? Mom asked, completely baffled.

—Mom, ever since I was born you’ve been saving up to send me to university. Did it ever occur to you that I might not want to go?

From the look on her face, you’d think I’d just told her I only had two days to live.

—And what are you going to be, Minas? A plumber?

I could see her counting the seconds in her head, the way her shrink taught her to. Her face was bright red.

—You mean I’m only allowed to become a lawyer or a teacher? Those are the only jobs that count?

I won’t bore you with the whole conversation. In the end she lost it and called Dad. She said she didn’t want to do something she might regret.

That night I heard her crying in the bedroom through the closed door.

In our house education is everything. There are bookshelves in every room with books lined up two rows deep. Both my parents studied literature. They met at university. Dad became a reporter. He’s always complaining about the long hours and how his cell phone never stops ringing. But when he’s not at the newspaper, he paces like a beast in a cage. His mind is moving twenty-four
seven, and always in the same direction. News is his sickness. For him reporting is serious business. To be a reporter means to be out walking the beat all the time, eyes and ears peeled. You have to know who to talk to and what kind of information you’re looking for. I mean, sure, he has a pretty high regard for journalists who write features and stuff, too. But for him, they’re a different breed. They don’t have to deal with the pressure of the quick turnaround, the day-to-day, they have more time to digest what they’re writing. They’re not out there in the trenches with the real reporters.

Mom comes from a long line of literature majors and teachers, and she’s proud of it. Her uncles and cousins all studied literature, and most of them are teachers. It’s in her genes, she says, since her mother studied literature, too.

Grandma Evthalia is a classical philologist of the old breed. In her day the Faculty of Philosophy accepted very few students, all of them top-notch. The girls who got in were the cream of the crop—rich or poor, they all knew their stuff. Grandma Evthalia speaks in proverbs, ancient Greek sayings and phrases from old schoolbooks. She reads Plato in the original, but she’s crazy about John le Carré, too. She’ll watch any thriller or police drama they’re showing on TV. She loves beating the detective to the punch. She always calls out the murderer’s name as soon as she figures it out, which Dad gets a kick out of, though it infuriates Mom.

Grandma Evthalia keeps close tabs on my education. When I was four, she taught me about ancient mythology.
I don’t know any fairytales, child, someone else can tell you about Little Red Riding Hood, what you’ll get from me is Poseidon
, she would say, raising her hand as if gripping a trident. She taught me syntax when I was eight, in the second grade, because she didn’t approve of my teacher, or of the modern teaching methods the Ministry of Education decided to implement. Subject, verb, object: she made me mark them with a pencil. She left the butterflies, bugs, and
flighty structural approaches
, as she called them, nostrils flaring, for kids whose mothers and grandmothers didn’t have literature degrees.

She was the one who bought me my first dictionary—and she didn’t mess around, either, she went straight for Triandafyllidis.
We graduates of Aristotle University don’t approve of the Babiniotis approach
, she told me, as if an elementary school kid would have any clue what she was talking about. She insisted on teaching me how to use it. She always took it down off the shelf carefully. But one afternoon it slipped from her hands and smashed my favorite toy car, a red one. She waited patiently for me to stop crying. Then she asked me to look up “assemble” in the dictionary and made me copy all the synonyms and antonyms into my notebook.

Mom found it amusing, but she also basically agreed with Grandma’s approach. Grandma advised her to take charge of my education, and she did. What we learned in school wasn’t enough. That was just the basics,
the absolute minimum
, as Grandma was always saying. I had to do my homework on my own. Mom, meanwhile, taught me the extra stuff, the above-and-beyond, the frosting on the cake that makes the difference between a diligent student and an exceptional one. We filled endless notebooks with language drills and math exercises,
the twin pillars of knowledge, the salt of all sciences
. Dad just looked on. He went along with my mother’s decisions—after all, he didn’t have time to waste on questioning her judgment.

I liked school. During summer vacation, when we’d go out to a place by the beach in Halkidiki, I was bored out of my mind. Sure, I chased frogs, collected ants, raced down the hill on my bike. I scraped my knees on brambles, did underwater flips in the sea, dug for worms in the dirt. I had to sit quietly in my room during siesta, even if I wasn’t sleeping. Which meant hours of computer games and piles of comic books. Sounds great, right? Maybe, but who could possibly stand it for eighty-six days in a row? In the afternoons Mom would prepare me for the
next year’s schoolwork. Sure, I whined, but studying was what saved me.

I don’t know when things took a wrong turn. Mom blames Kitsiou, the mule-faced history and language arts teacher we had last year. She filled my notebooks with red ink.
Is this really what you believe?
she would scrawl in the margin, enraged at my ideas.
He’ll never get far if he keeps going down that path
, she once let slip when Mom went in for a conference. My essays suffered from
a lack of organization and an overly aggressive sense of irony
. Mom’s angry comment to me when she got home was,
Her brains aren’t worth a fig
. Usually Mom tries to maintain some kind of solidarity with the literature teachers, but with Kitsiou things got so bad she wrote a letter to the principal. The perfect twenty on my report cards of previous years had dropped to a seventeen, then a sixteen, and it looked like it might go even lower.
I know my child
, Mom insisted to the department head,
there’s no way his performance has gotten so poor
. But no one could do anything about it. Inside her classroom, a teacher is queen of the realm, as Mom should have known.

I don’t think it was Kitsiou’s fault. At a certain point, school just became unbearable.

But I kept gritting my teeth and bearing it. If it were up to me, I would drop out before graduation. I started getting leg cramps, fevers, awful stomach aches, chronic gastroenteritis. And pain. Like hand grenades exploding in my gut. Once Mom even called a cab and rushed me to the hospital. The doctor smiled.

—It’s just nerves, was his diagnosis.

He gave me a double shot of tranquilizers.

—This would put even a bull to sleep, he told Mom, winking.

A week later the headaches started. I rubbed my eyes until I saw spots. I would’ve gouged my eyes out if I thought it would make the hammering in my head stop. I tied my bandana so tightly it left a mark on my forehead. I couldn’t stand up
straight, I had to lean against walls to walk. Mom brought me paracetamol, Lonarid, whatever over-the-counter painkiller she could find. I swallowed them and closed the door.

I basically lived in my room. Everyone seemed like morons. I guess I had a screw loose somewhere.

You can get pretty much any pill you want online. Antidepressants and anti-anxiety meds, Buspirone, hydroxyzine, sertraline, paroxetine, venlafaxine. It’s crazy. Indications, contraindications, proper dosage for facilitating synaptic transmission via serotonin reuptake. Great, as if that made any sense to anyone. No adverse effect on alertness, best results within a month. That’s what the website promised. You have to get off it gradually, though, or you’ll go into withdrawal. They never tell you how bad that part is.

Game over, Mom flipped out.
The door to your room is to remain open at all times
, she said. Actually, she started leaving all the doors and windows in the house open, to let in fresh air. And she made sure I got my recommended daily allowance of vitamin C, squeezed orange juice for me three times a day. She filled the house with whatever natural dope she could find: sallowthorn, ginseng, spirulina. Royal jelly, saffron tea, pollen. It all went straight down my throat.

And guess what? It turns out sunlight and exercise are all it takes to flood the brain with serotonin. All the magazines say so. Mom read that and made up her mind. For the time being she stopped bugging me about my homework, she figured my psychological well-being took priority.

Maybe it was a fear of competition, like that shrink said. To me he seemed like a nutcase himself. Mom got a zillion recommendations and references before settling on him. He asked a bunch of questions, I counted the pockmarks on the wall. He sang his little song, we handed over a hundred euros, he asked to see me again. Are you kidding me?

I mean, why don’t they all get lost.

All I know is, if I ever have to take another exam in my life, I’ll die.