The Scapegoat (21 page)

At the Ippokrateio I was always bothered by how dark it was in the hallways. Outside the sunlight was as loud as thunder, but its rays stopped at the door. As soon as I went inside I would flip the switch. You might say it was an insignificant detail. People were dying and what I cared about was the light. Until they sent me to Lembeti and I learned my lesson. I saw the worst and it knocked some sense into me.

—They’re not really sick, is what other people said. Sickness means pain. They don’t hurt.

I don’t blame them, it’s something I probably said myself at some point. For most people sickness means cancer. And maybe they’re right.

As long as they get their pills, they’re quiet. Every so often new doctors arrive with degrees from places like Paris who think you can cure with words. For them words are cheap and they’ll spend as many as they need. They’re against medication, that’s the first thing they tell you. But by the end of their first night shift, their fancy theories have all flown out the window.

Like the guy whose belt kept coming loose, and he was always adjusting it. He’d come to put us in order, or so he thought. With his fancy degree and his conferences in Europe and all the big words he knew. By now we’ve learned not to stand in their way. But behind their backs, we take bets on how long they’ll last.

He was on duty one Friday night. I couldn’t tell you why, but Fridays are the worst. Something gets into people, they blow their fuses. If you’ve spent any time at a funny farm you know.

The first hours passed quietly enough, so the doctor relaxed. He settled into a chair, stretched out his legs, even closed his eyes. A ten-minute nap, the sweetest sleep there is. But just then, a gypsy woman burst into his office with a baby in her arms, raising
gods and demons, demanding morphine. None of it seemed to disturb the baby’s sleep. At first our doctor tried to reason with her. He wasn’t going to sign off on anything illegal. The gypsy woman lost it, she didn’t have time for conversations and haggling, she threw the baby at him as if it were a sack and made a beeline for the medicine cabinet. The doctor grabbed the baby in the air, its eyes snapped open like a doll’s and it started to scream, terrified at finding itself in this stranger’s embrace. Soon enough the poor man was covered in tears and snot, and he was totally disgusted, but didn’t know where to put it down.

A few hours earlier he’d been lecturing us about minorities, but when he found himself with a gypsy bastard in his arms, he forgot all his fine words fast enough. He literally kicked the woman out of the place, with the help of the guard, who pretended to be shocked by the whole scene but was secretly enjoying it.

The supervisor had scheduled him to examine a patient in the lecture hall the next day. Our young doctor showed up with dark circles under his eyes. He was clearly in bad shape, but he kept it under control. There was a kid there, too, a high school kid whose father had called from the paper to ask if he could observe. He sat in a corner taking notes. Strange kid. He seemed more interested in the doctor than in the patient. If I were his mother, I wouldn’t have been proud.

I’d have been worried.

I’m not sure how long Evgnosia lived at Lembeti. She was already here when I came. I learned about her case from the older staff members. The hospital was Evgnosia’s home. She didn’t wander around unkempt like the others did. She used to comb her hair with an ivory hair clip. It might seem strange that they let her keep it, but she bit three nurses who tried to take it away. She cried and hit herself and in the end they felt sorry for her and gave it back. She used to carry it around wherever she went. The teeth were
broken, but she’d stand there running it through her hair two hundred times in a row. She had pretty hair, as black as a stormy sea. But it had started to fall out, and I would pick up whole handfuls of it in the corridors. The cleaning ladies complained and asked us to cut it,
what does a crazy woman want with hair like that
, they said. Downy fuzz grew back on her forehead, thinner than before. In the end all that was left was a few tufts here and there. So she would use her broken hair clip on them, and then pat down her hair with her palm. She cleaned her face with her own spit, like a cat, couldn’t stand to get water on her face, cried if I asked her to go and wash. She took her pills, stood in the corner, and never let out a peep. It was easy to forget she was there.

In all those years I only heard her voice once. It was raining, a real heavy storm, torrents of water rushed through the streets, a dirty river as high as your knees. The rain snuck in through closed windows, locked doors. The walls were covered in damp. The whole city had taken shelter indoors.

Evgnosia was pressed up against the window, staring out. It was the only time I ever saw her actually looking at anything. Don’t ask me what it was, though. All you could see through the window was sheets of water, the skies had opened. She started to say something, but what came out wasn’t words. She hadn’t spoken in years. No one else even noticed, because just then the plaster in the entrance fell—I’m telling you, there was that much water—and we had to go and check the damage. The guard shook his head.
I’ve been saying it for years
, he said,
if the place isn’t kept up, these things are going to happen
.

When we came back, her eyes were blank again. Whatever it was, was gone. There are no miracles in this line of work.

I’ve been taking care of their medications for thirty years. I take them out to walk in the yard. But never Evgnosia. Her chart said it wasn’t allowed, they kept her in the basement with the dangerous ones. Someone signed off on that, took the shame on himself and forgot all about it.

K. M., SECRETARY IN A POLITICAL OFFICE, MINISTER’S RIGHT HAND

I was good at my job. Everyone knew it, even my enemies. I accomplished things and left a good name behind. That was a different era, full of moral imperatives; our decisions affected people’s lives. At Christmas and Easter when I went back to the village everyone wanted to shake my hand. They would stand in a line, each with a gift and a good word. And each with a favor to ask. They were proud that their village had a man in the middle of things. I found people jobs, I attended their baptisms and weddings. I knew exactly how many votes my party could count on, how many each head of household controlled. I took care of the large families and they responded in kind.

I remember when they came to me about Stergios, they wanted me to make him a priest. But the church didn’t want him, his record wasn’t clean, he had some small-time theft on his record, and contempt for the law. The bishop had dug in his heels and was refusing to sign. Stergios’s uncle had eighty votes in his pocket, it was a big family, with plenty of kids and cousins.

—What you’re asking of me isn’t easy, I said, trying to lower his expectations.

—If it was easy, we’d do it ourselves. The kid is a bad apple, you can see for yourself, he’s not cut out for working. So we figured we’d make him a priest. He’ll have his salary, we can find him a wife. His mother wants him to be a teacher, but the boy never took to books. So a priest it is, and we’ll wash our hands of it.

The bishop acquiesced, but he wanted something in return: I had to find a place for one of his men in the gendarmerie. That’s how things happened in those days, you scratch my back, I scratch yours. Our ties were built with actions, not promises.

The minister signed off on it. He had more important things on his mind, was holding evening meetings with people in high places, while we did the dirty work.

That year things at the office were a mess. Foreigners had gotten involved in our affairs and the job was all telephone calls, paperwork, and visits. The case was of the utmost importance, the Minister informed us; there were national issues at stake. His superiors were constantly reminding him that how he handled the situation would determine not only the future of American aid to our country, but also his own career.

The Americans made statements to the press:
The nation of Greece will be judged according to how its government handles this case
. They’d lit a fire under our behinds, and we needed to find a solution.

The ministers were all at war with one another. No one wanted to be left holding the bag. Each of the suspects had his protector. They drove us crazy with phone calls.

They wouldn’t let Tzitzilis do his job. In the end, though, a
suitable solution
was found. Tzitzilis should be commended for keeping them all out of the mud.

The case was closed honorably and conscientiously; stamps and signatures rained down from above.

THROUGH OTHER EYES

It wasn’t long before a second-rate American reporter conducted the much-desired interview with the rebel chief. The American listened to his harangue, jotting things down in his notebook. The rebel fighters hadn’t eaten in days, their bodies were emaciated. Yet their eyes still gleamed, the reporter noted. They were nourished by privation and their faith in a common goal.
The only problem is, you can’t eat faith
, the reporter later commented to his editor.
It’s faith that swallows your conscience and good intentions
.

The General had a script ready in his head and was determined to say his piece.
We’re strong, we will prevail
. Truman had tricked the Americans, he said, into aiding the fascists. He
repeatedly maligned the President and his underlings in the Oval Office, but made it clear that, in his view,
good Americans
had no part in these goings-on. And if they were to rebuild their country, the Greeks were in dire need of aid.

The General saw the reporter not for what he was—the representative of a small, regional radio station, a powerless nobody who was simply doing the dirty work assigned to him—but as a chosen representative of the entire American people.
We’re ready to stop the Civil War
, the General told him,
and begin negotiations with anyone. Under one condition: that the members of the Greek government be recognized as the criminals they are
.

The American was of course not the proper individual to respond, but he couldn’t restrain himself. He smiled, as much as his good manners would allow, and noted laconically:
That’s one way of seeing things
.

The General wasn’t fated to be in power long; the Party soon decided to depose him. He was packed off to the Eastern block to be crushed by the Iron Curtain. His old comrades rushed to renounce him, so as not to worry that they might be next. The methods were tried and true, the procedures straightforward—and the General’s name immediately lost its glory. His successor, who had orchestrated the General’s removal, was soon paid in the same coin. They erased him from the official books, too, tossed him into the mire and sent him packing. Others came to fill his shoes. They may have been no better than the rest, but they watched their backs more carefully and kept things in balance.

In the meantime, the interrogations regarding the murder of Talas continued. The absence of forensic evidence left almost everything to conjecture. Tzitzilis and his men tailored the findings to their needs—only their needs kept changing with the circumstances, so that the case skittered this way and that like mercury on the marble floors of the government ministries. Solutions were settled upon in secret, on the basis of phone calls from on high and pressures from all sides.

The foreigners kept expressing their desire for the investigation to follow a particular path. That bothered the Greeks, particularly Tzitzilis, who was used to being left to his own devices. His instincts were never wrong, as everyone in Greece knew. But the foreigners insisted on getting regular reports.

Tzitzilis wasn’t cowed. Those sons of bitches would get what they wanted; his main goal was to close the case. He handed over a file of scattered materials, in a royal mess, as its receivers commented. The case finally reached the courts with sufficient evidence—massaged behind closed doors into proof—though also with plenty of holes that were only filled in during the course of the trial.

The General of the Greek rebel fighters fairly quickly found shelter in the Soviet Union. Forty years later, in an interview about an unrelated issue, a young, ambitious reporter asked him about the Gris case.

The General had recently returned to his native land. He had agreed—without much thought, some judged—to run for office on the ballot of the ruling party. His old comrades were appalled, but the General believed he was doing the right thing in giving his support to the prime minister who would change the country.

In the context of a national reconciliation, he was photographed with his adversary from the Civil War. The old enemies shook hands, but the photographers weren’t satisfied, and so they embraced. Flashbulbs popped.
It’s all an issue of symbolism
, the prime minister had stressed when arranging this meeting.
The old Greece, riddled by divisions of all sorts, has to be forgotten. What this country needs is change
.

The General understood the need for old hatreds to be buried with the dead. He smiled when his old enemy pronounced into the microphones that the General
had been his most worthy opponent
. But he refused to make peace with the former head of the
Communist Party, the one who had kicked him out of Greece.
Bastard
, he called him,
opportunist
. The reporters were pleased to get a front-page story out of it.

The ambitious reporter approached the General after his colleagues had left. He was hoping for something more than the official statements they’d all jotted down. He reminded the General of the Gris case and asked for an exclusive interview. The General was tired, he was no longer the young man who had moved mountains and deployed entire armies. But something in the reporter’s eye gave him pause. He told him to turn off the recorder. With a single sentence, he cleared Rimaris and the right. He muttered something about
dark forces
, but gave no further explanation. The brief interview was useless to the reporter, who made sure not to show his disappointment.