The Scapegoat (25 page)

Words rarely help. They can’t separate right from wrong. In situations like these everything is a matter of diplomacy. Intentions often have some degree of dignity. Documents don’t. That, perhaps, is the fundamental difference between the two.

It would surprise you how easily a piece of evidence can disappear, a signature can be forgotten.

The Gris case:
Res ipsa loquitur
.

MARINOS SOUKIOUROGLOU

Marinos Soukiouroglou hated the school. He felt an instinctive disgust for all educational systems, and for the Greek one in particular. He considered it spirit-crushing, obsessive and megalomaniacal. He despised its shallow formalism. The classes in ancient Greek language and culture—which the overwhelming majority considered the crown jewel of the humanities—primarily served, according to his more rarified understanding, to bolster national pride.

What dismayed him most was how history was taught. Students learned to think in a static manner, as if issues had a diachronic, unchanging character. For the Greek school system historicity was a theoretical concept, essentially unknowable. Meanwhile, most people Souk knew, particularly his colleagues but others as well, had received some reflected version of the European reception of ancient Greek glory and invested it with existential meaning, rather than trying to understand it as a historical construction. A sense of humor about such things was high treason. False modesty oppressed everything. He suspected that the root of all this was an unmentionable—yet systematically cultivated—puritanism that wanted knowledge to hurt. To be unmixed with pleasure or joy.

Even more annoying was the school’s simplistic notion of competition, as something limited to final grades. The holy ritual of the Panhellenic Exams gave an official form to the ambitions of students and parents alike. How you scored determined everything, or so most people believed.

For Soukiouroglou the exams were just a hazing ritual, a humiliation students had to endure in order to be initiated into the next stage of life. These days the average person on the street was fully convinced that the only option for a bright kid with a desire and ability to learn was to go to university, that anything else would result in certain disaster. Reality, however, didn’t
correspond to that collective figment of everyone’s imagination—and when that dawned on members of the entering class, they ended up spending their days at the cafés on the edge of campus.

A combination of Greek provincialism and nationalistic narcissism sustained the vicious cycle of the Greek educational system—which, rather than opening up toward the outside, systematically closed in on itself. Kids were raised in a corral where knowledge was kept separate from empirical observation, and where learning was presented as a kind of torture, rather than an exciting or pleasurable adventure. They were taught to have an uncritical respect for textbooks and for a teacher’s authority. Any impulse toward independent thinking was crushed before it ever raised its head.

That was why Minas had rebelled. His other teachers called it
adolescent anti-conformism
. And they had another, easy psychological explanation, which Souk more or less agreed with, though he knew there was more to it than that: they’d all seen Teta in action and had an inkling of how much pressure she put on Minas. For most of them a single conversation with her was enough to make them shake their heads and exchange meaningful looks of despair with their colleagues. Teta had staked her life on her son, as was clear to anyone who had experience dealing with parents.

But Souk knew there were deeper roots to Minas’s violent reaction to the institutional framework of education. Sure, Teta was annoying, but that wasn’t a sufficient explanation. Minas had taken on the system itself, and was sure to get what was coming to him. His response was irrational, physical, and absolute.

No matter how hard Souk tried to approach Minas calmly and neutrally, there was always a note of exasperation in his voice. Even he, who seemed on the surface to have made peace with his decisions and had learned to limit his intellectual ambitions to this sheepfold of a school, continued to be enraged by the idea of failure. He wanted Minas to succeed. He’d have forced him if he could.

Souk knew argumentation would have no effect whatsoever, so he tried to get Minas emotionally involved in a case that was a lost cause from the start. Most people considered Soukiouroglou distant and detached. None of them could have imagined how he caught fire in the classroom. It wasn’t just his sardonic wit, his cautious cynicism, or his emphatic precision, the combination of a strict literalism and the most unexpected metaphors. It was above all the way he drew, sometimes in an almost punishing manner, on the emotions—his audience’s but also his own. He knew how to touch a chord, always at precisely the right moment. He managed to mine those emotions the students tried so hard to hide behind their silly grins and stupid comments. He ruled his class like an enlightened despot—which is to say with an oppressive hand disguised as something else. After a year in his class, students had difficulty accepting a different teacher.

Of course he hadn’t lived his own life nearly enough. He’d shielded himself from the experiences that had burned so many others his age. But in the classroom he could finally be himself, become the person he believed himself to be. Most of his students were entranced by this transformation, swept up and carried off by the wave of his performance. Yet when the bell rang they were left hanging. The teacher’s thinking and rhetoric may have been the creations of an austere geometry, but the tsunami of his explosions—part performance and part collective psychotherapy—elicited their admiration while also striking them dumb. They set out on the path he carved for them and didn’t dare raise their heads.

Very few ever refused to dance to the beat of his drum. Minas was one of them. And it was strange, because Minas lived and breathed for Souk’s sake. Yet he kept his core well protected, didn’t let it be crushed by external pressures. Minas’s strength had been a continual surprise to the teacher, from his first year of middle school until today. Yet Minas also annoyed Souk to
no end, precisely because his defenses were impossible to break through.

Minas was destined from the crib to be every teacher’s favorite. He knew how to learn from others, from real-life situations. Souk tried to explain to the others what Minas already knew well, because he’d been taught it at home:
in learning a book isn’t enough, you need a mind, too
. A mind to distil information, to bring things together, to settle on a point of view.
There’s no need for students to become carbon copies of their teachers
, Souk repeated at every opportunity. He used Plato and Aristotle as his example. He loved telling the kids at school—who listened carefully, though who knows how much they understood—that Plato’s absolute idealism, which denied the senses all rights, had been overturned by his student, Aristotle. Sensory grounding, that was Aristotle’s upending of Platonic thought.

Minas listened in silence. A flammable adolescent but worthy interlocutor, he was intellectually tolerant yet obsessive about his ideas. Soukiouroglou loved him, but also found him hard to bear.

THE THINGS THAT HAPPENED BEFORE AND AFTER, AND THE THINGS THE OTHERS NEVER LEARNED

There are good endings and bad ones. In books, that is. In real life, things aren’t so simple, and the victims never get to say their piece. Yet those who judge shall also be judged. History is a boat whose hull is deep under water, and when it capsizes, everything is overturned. That’s what Soukiouroglou struggled to show them, with examples and radical claims.

When a top student who was considering military academy said something about the brutality of the Turks, calling on sources and eye-witness accounts, Souk—a third-generation refugee from Asia Minor with first-hand experience of victimization and loss, who certainly could have told his own stories
of Turkish brutality, yet judged it a good opportunity for a stern lecture about objectivity, the chimera of so many historians—let loose on the boy.

—Let’s take the familiar case of an airspace violation, Souk said, and the students in the front row nodded. The other day, for instance. It was the third story on the news. The Greek minister made some statements, et cetera et cetera, he continued, feigning boredom. But if you spoke Turkish and could read Turkish newspapers, you’d see that their approach to the situation was different. They spoke about the
obstruction of military drills, il
legal infringement, and so on.

Souk himself spoke Turkish fluently—he’d learned from his grandmother—and so he quoted a few headlines with perfect pronunciation. That small bit of showing off made it all more enjoyable for him, like a peacock fanning its tail.

—So, he continued, not breaking stride, let’s say fifty or a hundred years from now a Belgian historian decides to write about the incident, and has those sources at his disposal. What objective reality can he offer?

—That the sky exists. And that maybe some airplanes flew through it.

Minas had spoken without raising his hand, a bad habit he’d had since middle school. Souk had chastised him for it countless times. Then last year Minas withdrew to the very back row and stopped speaking at all, and the class had lost its thrill for the teacher, became boring, even. But Soukiouroglou couldn’t encourage that kind of behavior. He ignored Minas’s comment and offered yet another example: how Greeks talk about the fall of Constantinople and the Turks about its conquest.

Ever since the fateful day of the presentation (which Minas considered a debacle and Soukiouroglou a teachable moment, while Evelina’s and Minas’s mothers agreed that it had been a huge waste of time), Minas had been an absent presence at school. Not that things had been much better before.

So much precious time wasted
, Teta complained to Evthalia,
the child’s energies spent on useless things, people shouldn’t play those kinds of games with a graduating senior
. Evthalia didn’t have much to say in response—Teta was right, in a way, but then again
the boy showed everyone what stuff he was made of
, as Nikiforos had said. He stood his ground at a moment that would have destroyed so many others, even adults. They all had their degrees, and Minas was just a poor little eighteen-year-old in a General Education class. Which is to say, a nonentity.

TASOS

Minas gave his father back the box of materials that Tasos had selected to share with his son. Georgiou put it away in the storage space in the basement, next to his pile of front pages and the cassette tapes of interviews he had amassed when he was still wet behind the ears and had tried to bring the case back into the public eye. He’d talked to all kinds of people back then; his persistence opened doors. Two veteran reporters with access to those close to the trial even entrusted him with rare material. They saw the progress he was making, and thought there was some chance he might solve the case—and might mention their names when the unveiling finally came.

He would have, too, since he always honored his sources. Only events didn’t unfold as he expected them to. Georgiou’s mentor was a man by the name of Vatidis, whose connections and influence were universally recognized, who held entire administrations in the palm of his hand. When Vatidis found out about his young protégé’s new passion and, more importantly, about the material he had in his possession, he made it clear that
resolving that case wasn’t among the newspaper’s immediate priorities, much less those of the country
. Georgiou got the message loud and clear.

A year later, Georgiou was promoted to editor. He deserved
it, of course. He worked like a dog, anyone with eyes in his head could see that. What they didn’t see were the boxes of suppressed evidence in his basement. Even he forgot, eventually—after all, he’d made his choice. Though when Minas took on the project, for a moment his father felt tempted.

Just for a moment, and then it passed.

In the amphitheater that day, he listened as his son ran through the possible scenarios, some crazy, some unsupported, others with evidence to back them up, and still others that were fairly obvious. Two decades earlier he had known them all, down to the smallest details. In the silence Soukiouroglou imposed during the ritual of the presentation, Tasos watched Minas anxiously. His boy had grown up.

When the applause died down, he ran down the stairs two at a time, grabbed his son by the shoulders and shook him.

—Good job, kid.

That’s all he could say. Then he kissed him on both cheeks.

Teta didn’t share her husband’s excitement or the emotions of his response. But then she had never bowed before necessity, and had no boxes hidden in the storage space.

DINOPOULOS

Grandpa Dinopoulos’s shoes were pinching him. He’d asked Elena to leave the laces undone, but she thought that unbefitting a formal appearance. And now his bunions were paying the price. At least the pain made him aware of his feet—that was something, he comforted himself. Besides, his whole getup made him uncomfortable, from head to toe: his wool suit tickled him, and the way it rubbed against his thighs was a torment.

Evthalia had complimented him on his appearance, though:
Look at you, decked out like a groom
, she said. He could detect no accusation in the phrase, just a gentle jab at ancient history. That’s
how Evthalia was. She’d make a mountain out of a molehill but swallow a skyscraper without complaint.

Like the time she stopped him in the street to congratulate him on his marriage. He’d started to cross over to the other sidewalk, he knew he hadn’t been straight with her, even if he never made any promises.

But there she suddenly stood before him.
May you live long together
, she said, swinging her ponytail.
You suit one another
, she hastened to add, which bothered him, because he knew she believed it.
And may you have wonderful children
, she said, and Dinopoulos reddened, thinking of the activity that would inevitably precede a child—an activity he would gladly have undertaken with Evthalia.