The Scapegoat (11 page)

—Don’t make mountains out of molehills, was Evthalia’s steady advice. The child is fine, it’s your own head that needs examining.

But now that Minas had raised his banner of revolution, the ground had fallen away from beneath Teta’s feet. Apparently her obedient son wasn’t quite so obedient after all.

—Don’t fight him, Evthalia advised.

That’s when Teta exploded.

—Sure, she shot back, that’s easy for you to say. We both know I was raised on prohibitions, by a mother who always had to get her way.

Evthalia refused to discuss old wounds; she had no intention of revisiting decisions she had made decades earlier. But she didn’t protest: at her age she had learned to give way, to not waste energy on useless conflict but rather try and find a solution. This situation, though, seemed to have reached an impasse. Minas had dug in his heels and all Teta could do was tug at the leash.

Recently Teta had begun to resign herself.
You can’t live your son’s life for him, and you can’t make his decisions
, her therapist admonished.

Of course Teta thought Minas was the one who should be seeing a therapist, but he refused even to discuss anything “stupid,” a category that included therapists and their theories. Tasos and Evthalia both agreed with the boy’s evaluation, but since they didn’t have anything better to suggest, they kept their mouths shut.

Minas lived barricaded in his room. He rarely went out at
night, rarely talked on the phone. He was plugged in at all times. Teta searched the Internet history on his computer a few times, but never discovered anything worth worrying about. An interview with Jacques Derrida about the instability of meaning and the tyranny of the easy answer (good lord), poems and paintings by Nikos Engonopoulos (lovely, but useless for a graduating senior who should be preparing for his exams), a virtual tour of Prague (poor thing, he’d been planning for that trip), and a statue of Justice dressed like a rock star, with hair extensions, a sword, and a dog collar (perish the thought).

Teta didn’t feel great about spying on her son, but she also believed she was doing the right thing. Her therapist disagreed.
What you did was wrong
, he admonished,
human relationships are built on trust, and trust is hard to regain once it’s lost
. Teta didn’t take his chiding too seriously. The therapist based his judgments on books, while Teta based hers on experience. He had no children of his own, so who was he to tell her how to manage her son? She still went to see him regularly, and sought his advice about all kinds of things, but in the end she acted as she saw fit. Theories about mutual respect were all well and good, but she needed to know what she was up against.

When she finally went to Minas’s school she was past seeking advice; what she needed was an oracle. But most of his teachers felt that there was nothing they could do, no matter how sympathetic they were to her son. No one who teaches the senior class has time to babysit parents. Teta knew that, of course—or rather, she imagined it: she may not have been a teacher herself, but after so many years as a mother she knew a thing or two about schools.

It had been hard for Evthalia to accept her daughter’s decision not to become a teacher, a decision suddenly communicated to Evthalia together with the news of Teta’s pregnancy. Tasos and Teta knew that Evthalia wouldn’t lose her temper in front of a pregnant daughter. And indeed, Evthalia, as fierce as knives
when it came to issues of professional dignity and financial independence, accepted the blow without a single comment and held out her arms to the couple. Later, of course, when the dust had settled, she took her daughter aside.

Yes, she understood that Tasos’s job was a demanding one, with no set schedule or real days off, and yes, he made enough for them to raise a child on, particularly since they weren’t the type to indulge in useless luxuries—but,
Teta, honey
, Evthalia said sweetly, though she was fuming on the inside,
is that why I sent you to university, so you could shut yourself up in the house and raise a child?
She wanted to say
his
child, but at the last minute she held back, a fact for which she silently congratulated herself. Evthalia might not have been the sort of feminist who went around with hairy legs and sensible shoes, and she certainly hadn’t burned any bras, but she made no bones about raising her voice and giving people a piece of her mind when the situation called for it. She hadn’t quit her job to raise Teta, though her husband had tried to insist on it. Back in those days women were homemakers, each confined to her own tiny realm. Evthalia, however, wanted a salary of her own, so she wouldn’t have to ask for money to have a dress made. And when her husband died young and she received his first miserable pension check in the mail, she went to his grave, and instead of crying like all the other widows dressed head to toe in black, she told him,
See, if I’d listened to you, I’d be begging in the streets
, and washed his gravestone with a deep sense of vindication.

As the years passed Evthalia started to wear the pants that her husband had forbidden. She felt beholden to no one, and particularly not to the school inspectors who visited the school regularly and always gave the widow disapproving looks. She stood her ground, though, since at the end of the day she worked as hard as ten men.

—A pair of pants is the most modest thing a woman can wear, she told the principal assigned to the school during the junta, a
conservative theologian who dared to comment on her choice of attire. You can bend over as far as you want without worrying that someone might see your underwear, or even a thigh.

The theologian let the conversation die there.

Evthalia was the last of her cohort to retire. She left the school only when she had no other choice. That might have explained why it was so difficult for her to comprehend her daughter’s decision to become a housewife, no matter how hard Teta tried to dress it up with various theories.

—A woman with a literature degree shut up within the four walls of a kitchen, she hadn’t been able to restrain herself from saying, just once, years ago.

Teta refused to let it slide.

—At least I’ll be home for my child, I’ll be there to watch him grow up.

Evthalia silently accepted the jibe. Teta later apologized, but what had been said couldn’t be unsaid. Even if it was unfair, entirely unfair, in Evthalia’s estimation, Teta’s words had rung like a bell in her mother’s head ever since, marking with absolute precision how far Evthalia could go, how much she could say, and where she should take care to stop.

Thus it was that Teta devoted all her time and energy to Minas. The willful solitude of her only child had become something of a family joke. Teta liked to recount with feigned worry and thinly disguised pride a scene that had taken place at the playground. Minas, still a toddler, found a kid his age playing in the sandbox and sat down beside him, but instead of grabbing a bucket and shovel, tried to strike up a conversation:

—Do you like Miró? He’s my favorite painter.

The other kid promptly picked up his toys and left, not bothering to respond.

Teta had panicked. Minas had no social skills, she fretted to Evthalia.

—Is that something people are talking about these days? the
grandmother asked, and her daughter launched into a recitation from the parenting manuals she’d been reading.

While her child might have known to use the second person plural for polite speech, there were all sorts of things most people considered self-evident about which he had no idea. The guy at the kiosk, the woman at the bakery, and the man at the corner store all adored him, and showered her with compliments about how fast he was growing and how bright he was. But they belonged to the protected realm of the adult world; they wouldn’t dream of tormenting a child with mean-spirited teasing. Teta was terrified of the day when Minas would enter kindergarten. She went to meet the kindergarten teacher and told her that she was particularly concerned about her child’s socialization.

—He’s been raised among adults, she confided.

The teacher smiled. Yet another spoiled only child.

In the end, though, Minas was fairly easy-going, or at least that’s how it seemed from the outside and from a distance. But Teta’s antennas were always raised. She sensed that Minas was only mimicking behaviors, imitating a child’s whining or funny faces or clumsy gestures, repeating silly phrases. He was pretending to be what he was supposed to be.

The adults in his life fell for his routine, but what did they know? There was no fooling the other kids, who could tell right away that something wasn’t quite right with Minas, that he wasn’t
normal
. He seemed friendly and outgoing, made jokes, pulled pranks. And yet he didn’t fit in, didn’t conform—that’s what they would have said if they had known the word. But they didn’t, so the issue remained undefined, more of a feeling, a slight breeze that followed Minas around and made the other kids uncomfortable. Time passed and they got used to his strangeness. An unofficial truce developed, though only after plenty of conflict and tears on both sides. Minas wasn’t one to hang back. He met confrontation head-on: he knew that was the only way to resolve things, otherwise the fools just made things worse for you. So
when the class bully threw his penmanship book in the trash, a green notebook with twenty-five straight pages bearing the teacher’s
Bravo!
at the top, Minas lost his cool. He glared at the perpetrator like a bull staring down a bullfighter, grinding his teeth the way Tasos did when things weren’t going well at work, and suddenly made a beeline for the other kid.

—You’re a moron.

Words didn’t frighten the bully, but then words are superfluous when the adrenaline is pumping through a room full of twenty-seven preteens. And so words were followed by deeds. They threw a few awkward jabs. Minas didn’t know how to fight, but he was a big kid. His opponent, a nervous little runt, started landing kicks wherever he could. Minas let loose with a backhanded blow that half missed its mark, but the other half got the job done.

No one ever picked on him again. It was as if an atypical agreement had been signed that day, a secret contract that gave Minas the right to his refuge. He said hi to the other kids and they said hi back. They knew nothing about his life and he wasn’t interested in learning about theirs. Of course the appropriate invitations to parties were exchanged. None of them had any desire for their parents to figure out exactly what was going on. When it comes to things like that, children display complete solidarity, cautious and resilient as steel.

Thus it was that Minas’s “social skills,” as Teta called them, never developed through regular interactions with his peers.

—Let the child be, was Evthalia’s advice. He doesn’t have any real peers at school, he’ll find them at the university.

It was a convenient solution, since it pushed the problem off to a future date, which at the time had seemed fairly distant. At the time. Now, though, when the much-discussed year of exam preparation had arrived and his parents’ high expectations had suddenly flown out the window, Minas’s social isolation presented yet another burden—though at this precise moment such
issues paled in comparison to Minas’s provocative declarations concerning the Panhellenic Exams.

Teta watched as the other kids ran their long-distance race. The other mothers never missed an opportunity to update her on their children’s progress. With glee, it seemed to her, though they probably thought they were just being friendly. Teta felt like a turtle missing its shell. Her brief chats with other mothers on the phone and their chance encounters around the neighborhood filled her with a dreadful guilt. No matter how hard she fought it, no matter how many times Evthalia tried to comfort her with the observation that
these things happen, just try to adjust
, she still felt that she must have done something wrong to make Minas fall apart at the very moment when the other kids were rising to the challenge, even those who were clearly not destined to succeed.

And then there was Evelina Dinopoulou, who always came in second, right behind Minas—until last year.
So diligent, so mature
, crowed her mother, who was hoping her daughter would score high enough on her exams to enter the faculty of law. Evelina’s mother was discreet enough never to ask after Minas. But even that didn’t seem like a kindness to Teta; it came across as a slight.

—You’re imagining things, Evthalia tried to mollify her.

Teta didn’t listen. She was convinced that everyone was talking behind her back. As Evthalia saw it, even if they were, that was no reason for Teta to dance to the beat of their drum.

—What did you think, you poor thing? Evthalia asked. That the hard part was the diapers and the baby food? You’re only just starting to realize what it means to have a child. Now is when the real worrying begins.

Teta had already come to that realization on her own, and couldn’t bear for someone else to rub her face in it—least of all Evthalia. What she wanted from her mother was comfort and consolation, a ready hug and a pat on the back. Not admonitions. But Evthalia was a general, as Tasos always said. She gave
orders, not comforting words. She was a problem-solver who didn’t waste time on hysterics or sentimentality.

Teta had pinned her hopes on Soukiouroglou. He was the only teacher at the school whom Evthalia really trusted.
He knows his letters
, she’d told Teta, and that was saying a lot. For Evthalia, it was everything—which is why she said it very rarely, particularly when speaking of the younger generation of teachers.

Soukiouroglou kept everyone at a distance. No one ever dared address him informally; he had no use for false familiarity. He always corrected students’ papers within a day. He didn’t let things drag on. If he said he would do something, you could be sure the job would get done on time.

When Teta went to talk to Soukiouroglou, she got straight to the point. She laid out the problem as objectively as she could, held back her tears, tried not to sound judgmental. Her son’s teacher listened without interrupting. He expressed no sympathy. It wasn’t in his nature to comfort, he believed that was a role for family members, and he was at the school to get a different job done.