The Full Catastrophe (26 page)

The next morning, a Friday, I came back and found Mohammed and his coworkers running down the street after a blue sedan. They caught up with it at a stoplight and started banging on its tinted windows, though the driver sped off once the light turned green. Mohammed returned out of breath. “Look,” he told me, holding up a fake twenty-euro bill streaked with watercolor paint. “Big loss.” The beefiest of the Bangladeshi sales crew, a man with a shirt that said
PREMIER
across the chest, screamed in disgust and shook his head as if trying to exorcise a bad spirit. “We do illegal job,” said Mohammed. “But we trust. I never pay with fake note. Never never. He is very bad man. Not good person,” he said of the guy in the sedan, an Albanian, according to Mohammed. For the next half hour, Mohammed couldn’t think of anything else. “We make little profit. Why people do this to us?” he said. “If he comes again, I will remember his face. And then he will know who we are.” I asked Mohammed what he meant by that. “Next time when they come, we will beat him,” he explained. Mohammed
told me there were between fifteen and twenty Bangladeshis on the block, and sometimes they were forced to apply their numerical advantage to protect the viability of their business. Once a junkie tried to buy a pack of cigarettes without enough money, Mohammed said. There was a big argument. The junkie started getting aggressive. “So we beat him. Kicking. Fifteen people. We not break rib. Fracture.” Another time, a junkie gave them a Turkish lira coin instead of a euro. “Many of us scream. I think maybe he was a little bit scared, so he gave the cigarettes. We just protect ourselves. Otherwise we never touch anybody.”

Business and traffic began to pick up in the early afternoon. An old man in sunglasses rolled up to the corner in a fine blue 1980s Mercedes. He held up an empty pack of Gold Mounts, which featured a golden image of a mountain on the front and the slogan “Full Flavor Finest Virginia.” Shaheen provided a carton. The man forked over a ten-euro bill and continued to creep down the street. “He’s very good person,” said Mohammed. “He comes back every three or four days. He says nothing. Buys carton. Never gives fake notes.” Another man drove up on his moped and looked at the product offerings with a skeptical expression. Mohammed provided advice. The Gold Mount Slims were very light. Raquel was “like Marlboro, but not Marlboro.” The moped driver took a carton of each. A nice old lady then walked up. She ordered a pack of RGD. “They’re the best ones,” she told me. “They don’t make your throat hurt.”

The time was 1:25 p.m. Mohammed announced that he had to leave for Friday prayers. First he would go home and change into nicer clothes, he said, and then ride his bicycle to the mosque. I asked him if I could meet him there, and he agreed. The mosque was located in a derelict warehouse building on a narrow street inhabited primarily by Pakistanis, Bangladeshis, and some Chinese immigrants. Most of the storefronts on the street were empty, though a South Asian grocery store was doing a brisk business
selling paan. I walked inside the warehouse building and went up the dark, narrow set of stairs. On the top floor, Bangladeshi men in white skullcaps sat on a green carpet. An imam in a white robe sat in the front of the room and preached in Bengali through a microphone. A reverb effect gave his voice a holy gravitas. This was one of many unofficial mosques in Athens. Over the course of the previous decade, repeated proposals to build an official one had been undone by fierce local opposition. Mohammed arrived shortly after I did and took a seat on the carpet. Bored listening to a sermon in a language I could not understand, I decided to wait for him outside.

Across the street from the warehouse, I found a fabric store in a crumbling neoclassical building with a plaque on the front that read
L. Konstantinidis.
The store was a holdout from a bygone era in which the neighborhood was filled with textile shops and Greeks. I stepped inside and looked around. A man with frizzy white hair emerged from a back room filled with rolls of fabric stacked to the ceiling. I introduced myself and told him I’d come to the neighborhood to see the mosque. “Are you also writing about the Greeks who are suffering because the Bangladeshis spit everywhere?” he said.

“So they bother you?” I said.

“They don’t bother me,” he said, seemingly abandoning his displeasure. “Well, they did strip the plumbing out of the building upstairs and the bronze handles off the doors. But they are hungry. Why are they hungry? That is the question.” I asked him if he had an answer. “Because we whites are destroying the planet,” he said. I was surprised to hear this and asked him what he meant. The shopkeeper told me that humans once inhabited Mars, until whites depleted its resources, and the whites were doing it again now by destroying the earth. He perhaps noticed a disbelieving look on my face. “Don’t take me as demented,” he said. “Was there water or life on Mars? There are a lot of Greeks at NASA, and they
will find out. Of that you can be sure.” I changed the subject and asked him about the shop. It had been there since 1959, he told me. His father, a refugee from Asia Minor, had started the business. The man said he had wanted to be an astrophysicist, but his father needed help running the place. “So I grew up and got old here,” he said. All the other textile shops began closing down two decades ago, he told me. “Globalization ate them up.” His store survived only because he maintained a profitable business supplying fabric imported from China to a manufacturer of police uniforms. The shop owner then shared his theory as to why Greece had gone bankrupt. “Capitalists collect the wealth so it won’t spread, because if the worker has money, he won’t work. That’s what happened here. With borrowed money, we were all rich. So we didn’t work. That’s how we destroyed the country.”

A couple of Greek men walked into the store. One of them had long curly hair and looked like he belonged in an ’80s hair band. They were standing around talking about the fact that there were no Greeks left in the neighborhood when, from outside, a small Chinese lady in snug light blue pants and pink roses on her high heels asked them if they could remove the car they had just parked there. “You better do what she says,” the shopkeeper told the men. “There’s no way she won’t get her way.” The lady was preparing for a large shipment to be delivered to her residence, a two-story lime green building across the street that was meticulously maintained in comparison to the other buildings on the block. A rainbow-colored garden windmill turned among the potted plants on the balcony. At the end of the street, a flatbed truck had pulled up carrying a very large shipping container with
COSCO
written prominently on the side, the name of a Chinese state-owned shipping company. A division of COSCO had a few years earlier purchased the rights to operate container terminals at the port of Piraeus, one of the biggest ports on the Mediterranean, located near Athens. The company invested considerably in the port,
increasing both cargo volume and the number of jobs. For the Chinese, the port was an important landing point for goods it wanted to sell in Europe. Apparently, that included a large number of tennis racket–shaped electric bug swatters. The shipping container at the end of the street was filled with them. It, however, was too big to fit down the street, so the Chinese lady employed some of the South Asian men that had previously been loitering on the sidewalk to unload the boxes and carry them to her building. The men from the fabric store stood at the doorway and watched as one large box after another of tennis racket flyswatters was loaded into the ground floor of the Chinese lady’s building. The swatters were a product I’d seen immigrants peddling on the street. Apparently, this Chinese lady was their supplier. “Globalization in action,” I said to the shop owner. “Greeks could learn something from her,” I added, half kidding. The men seemed to take me seriously, though. “We once knew, but we forgot,” said the guy with the big hair.

I later found Mohammed outside the mosque unlocking his bicycle. I asked him what he had prayed for. “For my happiness. Happiness for my family. Happiness for all Muslims. Happiness for all humans.” He hopped on his bicycle and peddled uphill back to his street corner.

Philoxenia,
the Greek word for hospitality, means “love of strangers.” Greeks are often thought of as some of the world’s most hospitable people, and there is truth in this. The number of tourists who visit Greece every year far exceeds the country’s population, and indeed Greeks amiably welcome them, and their much-needed money. In my experience, I was often treated with exceptional warmth and generosity in Greece. When my wife and I arrived in Athens from Berlin, for example, we noticed
that it was difficult to pass through an outdoor farmers’ market without being plied with gifts for our child. This didn’t change when people detected that my wife couldn’t speak Greek, or that I spoke with an American accent. “Some mandarins for the boy! It will make him healthy!” As we strolled past farmers’ stalls, sun-wrinkled faces gazed at our son while making a spitting gesture, a precaution against the evil eye, which can be inadvertently given through excessive admiration. This was not the kind of thing that would happen in Berlin.

Philoxenia
, however, generally does not apply to those who arrive in need, to work and to stay. This has been evident since the 1990s, when, after the fall of the Iron Curtain, Albanian migrants began illegally crossing the border into Greece. Greece was not accustomed to receiving large numbers of non-Greek immigrants, and while the Albanians’ cheap labor was broadly welcomed by those who benefited from it, the Albanians’ personhood was often not. Certainly, Greece is not the only European country to have a deeply ambivalent relationship to newcomers, but Greeks’ wariness has manifested itself in some unique ways. For instance, students at the top of the class in Greece are given the distinction of carrying the Greek flag during patriotic school parades. Periodic controversies have erupted, however, in instances when the best student has been of Albanian origin. One Albanian student in a small town in northern Greece was twice the best student in his class in the early 2000s, and was twice denied the honor of holding the flag. “This flag is stained with the blood of our national heroes who fought to liberate Greece, and must not be raised by the hands of a foreigner,” a spokesman for a village parents’ group said, according to an article in Britain’s
The Independent
at the time. Not surprisingly, this reaction seemed to eliminate any desire the Albanian student had to accept the flag honor. “I declare that I give up the right to carry the flag,” he said at the gates of his school.

Someone ought to have informed the parents’ group that many of the flag-bearing heroes of the Greek War of Independence spoke a dialect of Albanian. The Arvanites, as they are called, arrived in the territory that is now Greece during the Middle Ages, and lived in large numbers in the area around Athens and the northern part of the Peloponnese. After Greece won its independence—with a large contribution from its Arvanite population—the Arvanite language was censored by the Greek state. Still, people spoke it in private, including two of my Peloponnesian grandparents. One of them, my paternal grandmother, descended from an Arvanite mountain village in Corinthia she knew as Dousia, though, when I visited the place, its name had long been changed to the more Hellenic Kefalari. Greeks of Arvanite origin often deny any relation to modern-day Albanians. This is partly for reasons of religion; Arvanites, like almost all Greeks, are Christian Orthodox, while the majority of religious Albanians identify as Muslim. Moreover, to acknowledge a close connection would complicate Greek national ideas of a pure Hellenic lineage. Still, when Albanians began arriving in Greece in the 1990s, some Arvanites who still spoke their fading dialect discovered they could communicate with the Albanians who had come to work on their farms.

It was in great part due to the large number of Albanian immigrants in Greece that in 2010, the Greek center-left parliament passed a bill that made it far easier for children born in Greece to foreign parents to be given Greek citizenship. The law was unpopular, however, with the large number of Greeks who believe that “one is born Greek and does not become Greek,” as it’s commonly put. When he was campaigning for the premiership in the spring of 2012, Antonis Samaras, the leader of New Democracy, vowed to abolish the law, which he called a “magnet for illegal immigrants.” A lot of people seemed to approve of this thinking. At a Samaras campaign rally I attended in Athens, his repeated calls for growth-oriented economic policies were not met with nearly
as much enthusiasm as his vow to “remove from this place illegal immigrants, who have now become tyrants of the society.” Samaras, around this time, also called the influx of illegal immigrants an “unarmed invasion” and said his election would mean the end of a state that took care of foreigners and forsook its own citizens. After Samaras’s election, parts of the citizenship law he campaigned against were deemed unconstitutional by the country’s highest administrative court.

At the time of the 2012 elections, Greece was in an acute phase of its debt crisis and teetering on the edge of a euro exit that would have sown sudden and profound economic chaos. It was therefore curious that, with such pressing issues at hand, the citizenship law and illegal immigration played such a prominent role in the election campaigning. This no doubt had to do with the rise of Golden Dawn, which gained a great deal of political traction almost solely due to its anti-immigration rhetoric. Other parties felt the need to compete. The tough talk was not limited to the right wing. In the run-up to the elections, the PASOK minister overseeing the police, Michalis Chrisochoidis, vowed to round up 30,000 illegal immigrants and place them in old military bases. He also announced plans to construct a barbwire fence along several miles of the Evros River Valley border, an idea European officials referred to as “pointless,” arguing that migrants would simply find another way in. During a visit to Brussels, however, Chrisochoidis said his countrymen could no longer tolerate the “time bomb” that was threatening social peace.