The Scapegoat (23 page)

Souk was on recess duty. He’d heard what happened, but he didn’t run over to offer consolation, or to see Evelina’s puffy eyes from up close. It might have bothered her that he didn’t, but I respect it. Souk doesn’t turn other people’s lives into theater. He
talked to her in class, but only to quiz her on something. World War II might not be the best way of making conversation, but Souk doesn’t know how to talk to you when things get personal. He never shows you he cares, doesn’t waste his breath on sweet talk, never reaches out a hand.

Grandma calls it
the Socratic method
. She considers it
the highest pedagogical technique
. I call it cornering a person. Instead of just telling you what I want you to know, I ambush you with questions. You try to escape, but you can’t. You can run whichever way you like, but in the end you’ll fall right into my trap.

Souk tried to make the most of the opportunity, though. He talked about
conditioned mass behavior
, about
demagoguery
and
emotional manipulation
, though of course not on a personal level, always in reference to the historical subject matter we were dealing with. And there was more: the
cost of choices, on a political and national level
, and
the upholding—and betrayal—of responsibilities. He who has ears, let him hear
.

Souk knows everything about World War II. And he looks at the world through that lens. It’s what Dad calls
intellectual autism
and Grandma calls
embedded knowledge
.

Evelina doesn’t care about any of that. All she wants is to get the exams over with. If she could she would take all the subjects in a single day.
A soul that’s ready to leave should leave
. Grandma says it, too, and she’s usually right.

It’s exactly how I feel about my presentation. Souk reminded me that next week is the last week of the quarter. He handed me a slip of paper with the date and time of my talk. He’s going to put an announcement up on the door of the teachers’ office, too. If I want to invite someone, I should do that now.

In other words, my days are numbered.

If I talk for more than twenty minutes, he’ll cut me off. I have to leave time for questions.
Don’t mince words
, he advised. And if I want to use PowerPoint, I have to take care of the technical side of things myself. Souk isn’t good with computers. He sometimes
uses one of the school laptops in class, but he’s as helpless as Mom. He goes to Athens by way of Tokyo. Speed and adaptability aren’t his forte.

The greatest wisdom is in simplicity
, as Grandma says.

Twenty minutes. I don’t know what to say and what to leave out. Souk told me to turn in a typed version, too, with a cover page and list of references, and a blank page for him to write his comments. I asked for last-minute instructions, but he mocked my request.

—That’s the danger with freedom: it’s an abyss. Will you fall in? It’ll depend on you, Georgiou.

Mom and Dad both threatened to show up for my presentation. Grandma was the first to invite herself. She wouldn’t go to visit Dinopoulos at his house, but said she would see him there. The old man listened with his eyes closed as I relayed her message, then let out a little laugh. I’m pretty sure he’s not going to die before he at least talks to Grandma again.

It’s hard to believe, but they’ve got lives, too. Our parents, and our parents’ parents. A biology teacher once said that, one of those low-on-the-totem-pole teachers who get transferred to our school at the last minute, right before classes start. The older teachers treat them pretty badly, and none of them ever sticks around for a second year. Anyhow, the biology teacher was annoyed at us over something, and said:

—You know, your parents have lives. They’re not just parents, they’re a couple, too.

Evelina laughed. The biology teacher had no wedding ring. We used to run into her at bars sometimes. Her hair was always mussed, and she came to school on a bicycle. In the schoolyard it was easy to mistake her for a student. So who was she to talk?

But what she said got me thinking: if my parents are a couple, when precisely do they do it? There are no locked drawers full of condoms at our house. Though they do have a roll of toilet
paper hidden under their bed. That might
constitute evidence
, as Grandma would say.

Evelina said she would take care of my handout.

—You’re already wasting your time on this presentation, so you might as well do the job right, she snipped.

She spent a whole twenty minutes making copies on beige paper she picked out herself, without consulting me, of course. For an exam-obsessed senior with her ambitions, it’s a lot, actually.

Evelina doesn’t need to think, she decides. She knows what she wants and works like a dog to achieve it: a law degree, her name on her grandfather’s office. She’s got a ten-year plan.

She doesn’t get it.

She’s trying to plan her life. Which she’ll live once everything is in order. When she’ll have free time.

She just doesn’t get it.

Life doesn’t sign contracts. It doesn’t make treaties. You’ll never get back the blood you spit. And you can’t store it up in some piggy-bank, either.

What you end up with is a big fat nothing.

Zero, zip, zilch.

As for me, the dribbling, the passes, the excuses, the procrastination, it’s all over. It’s time for me to face the music.

THROUGH OTHER EYES

The news wasn’t good.

—The worst is yet to come, Evthalia prophesied when Teta told her what had been going on. Things at the newspaper had been bad for months. Tasos was having insomnia, his acid reflux had flared up, and his palpitations, and the shouting in the
shower. No matter how you looked at it, the situation was fucked.

There was no way he could avoid firing people, it was now clear. As for voluntary redundancy, which once struck him as a professional indecency and an insult to his co-workers, it now seemed like a dream solution, no longer an option.

When Teta pressed him to tell her what was happening, he lashed out.

—What do you want to hear from me, Teta? Don’t you get it? It’s like we’ve got the dead man’s coffin sitting there in the living room. It’s like that every day at work. It’s too much.

And it was. Georgiou had gotten used to winning the war, to calling the shots, to being flexible, when circumstances required. But now his hands were tied behind his back.

—You should resign, his mentor bellowed over the phone. An old-school reporter from the Pleistocene age, he had supported Georgiou more than a few times when the going got tough. Editors-in-chief are chosen for how they’ll respond in a crisis, he continued. They should know how to run a paper, and they should know how to step down, too.

Georgiou hung up the phone in a poisonous mood.

—When you have a child, you’re willing to swallow your pride, Teta murmured. We don’t have the luxury of abandoning good jobs when the world around us is burning.

Tasos wanted to shout that it would be easier for him to support his staffers if Teta had some job of her own that brought in a steady wage. He knew it wasn’t fair, the two of them had made that decision together, having a family means being present, a child doesn’t just grow on its own, like a cactus. At the time it had seemed like a logical decision, one that supported him in his career and soothed his guilty feelings. Now it felt like a noose around his neck, at a time when the foundations of his world were being shaken.

The able and the incompetent were all in the same boat, they could all lose their jobs: the numbers simply didn’t add up.
Friendships that blossomed during happier times withered overnight. Even smiles suddenly became suspicious, since anyone who smiled surely had a protector somewhere. They all slept and woke in the same haze of anxiety.

For a while the adults in his life left Minas to his own devices. They had other worries on their minds, more important problems to solve. Salary cutbacks, the unpleasant task of firing friends, taxes that were bringing everyone to their knees. At first Minas was taken aback by this sudden lack of interest, particularly on the part of his mother, who stopped keeping track of his lost study time and glued herself to the TV.
She’s more interested in floating-rate bonds than in gerunds
, he told his grandmother.

Evthalia was the only one who kept her cool in the chaos. She was infuriated by how the administration was handling the situation, and discussed their royal mess of a country with Teta over the phone and over morning tea with her girlfriends at Terkenlis. And then she would shake off these unpleasant thoughts with a
this too shall pass
—she wasn’t going to lose sleep over it, she had seen plenty of catastrophes in her day, wars, people killed, and she certainly wasn’t going to take too seriously this game of Monopoly unfolding before her eyes.

—It’s money, dear, it’s only money, she kept telling Teta.

—I don’t think you really understand, her daughter would shriek, on the verge of hanging up the phone.

Evthalia had learned to ignore Teta’s hysterics, which were only exacerbated by the news coverage, the front-page articles, and the confidential information Tasos brought home from work. She circled the date carefully on the calendar. On February 25, a Tuesday, Minas would present his research paper. Her grandchild took priority.

Evthalia put on her favorite knit suit, bordeaux colored, and painted her nails a pearly white. She’d had her hair done at the
salon and was carrying a purse Minas had given her, though it wasn’t her style. Her grandson was the only person who gave her gifts. Modern bags with removable pouches, colorful bead necklaces that hung down to her navel, or more rarely an asymmetrical shirt or pareo. Teta had settled years ago on simply giving her money, which she considered more practical.

Tasos was fretting about being late for a meeting at the paper, but Teta shut him up with a look. In the elevator she grabbed his cell phone, put it on silent, and tossed it in her purse. Without his phone Tasos had no idea what to do with his hands. When they got out to the street, he put his arm around her.

Grandpa Dinopoulos came in his wheelchair. Elena had trouble getting him into the building, since there was no ramp, but the guard was friendly and the old man as light as a feather. They managed to get him into the lecture hall in plenty of time. Evelina had never seen her grandfather wearing a suit—even when they went to see him on New Year’s he always had on pajamas. He looked good in dark blue, with a handkerchief tucked into his breast pocket. His heavy glasses kept sliding down his nose and his right shoulder looked slightly hunched where there was too much fabric. But a good close shave had done wonders, and you could smell his cologne from a distance. Elena waved at Minas, who hurried to introduce Mr. Dinopoulos to his teacher.

Soukiouroglou had put up the announcement, but none of the other teachers had come. It was no time for experimentation, there was too much material to get through. The principal was preoccupied by the recent developments, and the guidance counselor couldn’t find a way to make Soukiouroglou’s initiative count in her file. The teacher’s proposal that students from other sections be invited was rejected. No one had any desire to babysit a bunch of teenagers outside of class.

The auditorium, the crown jewel of this old, palatial building, was an amphitheater designed by some enlightened architect eighty years earlier, before the task of building schools was
turned over to contractors. Soukiouroglou led Minas’s parents into the higher of the two sections, to have a complete view of the events. Then he steered Evthalia to a seat in the front row beside Dinopoulos, who had been smiling at her from a distance. Evthalia gave a coquettish wave as she neared. A spark glinted under her eyelashes—the same spark that flashed in Minas’s eyes when he was misbehaving, when he was consciously disobeying the rules.

Evelina distributed the handouts and Minas plugged his thumb drive into the school computer. Soukiouroglou sat down in the audience and signaled for his student to begin.

Nineteen minutes and thirty-five seconds, timed on his cell phone. Minas’s classmates burst into applause. Some out of boredom, others out of interest, most because they considered it part of the process.

—You’re now free to ask questions, Soukiouroglou opened the floor.

Utter silence. The students had been trained to listen. Their years of schooling had taught them all kinds of useful things, but how to formulate questions was not one of them.

Soukiouroglou turned to Dinopoulos.

—As one of the individuals immediately involved in the case, might you want to ask something?

Evthalia nudged the old man, who licked his chapped lips.

—If you want to discuss the case of Manolis Gris, Dinopoulos answered, keeping his voice as steady as he could, by all rights you should acknowledge that making sure justice was served wasn’t the primary consideration. Or rather, while it may have been a concern for those individuals immediately involved, it certainly was not for the country as a whole. As with all vital decisions that affect large groups of people, you do the best thing for the greatest number. We did something for the sake of something
else. It may be complicated to explain, but it’s self-evident in the moment of action. Which is why a neutral assessment of the events is the safest and most honorable approach. I agree with the young man’s method. It’s wise to present events as objectively as possible. No one can verify exactly what happened on the day of the murder, if you want my opinion, he concluded.

Soukiouroglou caught fire.

—In my class students are taught to take a position. Neutrality is a myth.

Dinopoulos shook his head. He’d never had much respect for high school teachers. They were all talk and no action. They lived at a remove from the tumult of the real world, in an alternate universe built of words and ideas. Evthalia with her practical mind was, of course, an exception. Be that as it may, the lawyer was tired of arguing the self-evident, as he’d been for doing decades.