Sophia Nikolaidou: The Scapegoat

I was a fool. I thought life owed us something. Disasters were for other people, that’s what I thought. I’d never been denied anything.

I got out all the crystal from my dowry. I wrapped each piece carefully in rags, then packed them in barrels, in layers of hay. I would take it all to America, even the porcelain tea set for my dolls. I would have a baby girl and we’d sip tea and pretend to be ladies together. Our departure date had been set.

Auf Wiedersehen .

Jack had been up in Salonica for days. We’d fought, that’s what the papers wrote. But I had only stayed behind to pack for our journey. Our clothes, the radio from my dowry, the embroidered sheets. The furniture he’d brought back from the Middle East. The desk, the armchairs, the bed. I had a suit made for the flight, pear green, with a cream-colored hat and gloves and a bow at the back. New clothes for a new place. A new life.

It wasn’t a serious argument. We’d have settled things with a kiss. In bed, where all our fights got resolved. Jack just didn’t want to bring me with him. He was trying to protect me. I arrived, as we had agreed, a few days later, and was told that he’d gone missing.

I was the only one who didn’t worry. I was sure he’d return. It was a foolish but unsinkable optimism. A childish stubbornness. People commented on it, I know. Everyone else was worried, you see.

— His mule of a wife comes and goes without a care in the world, people at the hotel whispered behind my back.

I asked them to heat water, so the bath would be ready when he came back. I left him a note and went out for a walk in the town, to buy ribbon for a hem. Make sure to shave, honey, so your whiskers don’t tickle me. I miss you. Zouzou .

That was his pet name for me, Zouzou. He would purse his lips and say it playfully. Zouzou, will you pour me some whiskey? Zouzou, what did you do with my newspaper? Zouzou, want me to teach you to dance jazz? He thought it was funny that I knew how to waltz but couldn’t dance jazz. He was a wonderful dancer. He could dance for hours on end. He would pull me onto the dance floor, hold me in his arms, and I’d let myself go.

— Listen to the rhythm, he would whisper in my ear. With this kind of music, all the dancing happens below the waist. You’re from the East, you know how it goes.

He would slip his hand under my skirt so casually that no one even noticed.

— He’s handsome, your husband, Antrikos’s wife said to me one afternoon when we were getting snacks ready in the kitchen.

I liked it when other people admired him. I didn’t even mind all the crazy things he did, the fire in his belly. I preferred him that way, it was better than him clinging to my skirts . A husband should be the master of his house , my mother said . And a wife should know how to manage him , she would continue, embroidering dishtowels for my dowry . Marriage takes work, little miss , she lectured me when I was a girl. She taught me the rules, her rules . First, always be attentive. Second, learn how to pamper. Third, provide beauty in the home and in your dress. Fourth, housekeepers and maids should be good, obedient, and fat . If I asked why they should be fat, she would shake her head. Because a fat woman knows how to cook, my dear. And she’ll never set a house on fire , she would continue, though she never explained what she meant by that. Five, tell the truth to the priest, not to your husband. Six, separate bedrooms save a woman’s sleep and her marriage, too. Seven, a husband should love and care for his children. Eight, your nightgowns should be even finer than your dresses. Nine, always be a lady, except in bed. Ten, marriage is a career. It takes persistence, endurance and dedication .

Those are the things my mother taught me. If she could, she would have opened my little girl’s brain and shoved it all in. The first time she met Jack, she gave him her hand and smiled. That night she pumped me for information. Where he lived in America, who was paying him now that he was working in Greece, if he’d ever behaved improperly with me, since she’d heard that Americans have no manners. She wasn’t too keen on the fact that he didn’t speak French. How would she tell him everything she needed him to know?

Because my beanpole, as she called him, would be taking me far from the war. We would go to live in New York. The houses there didn’t have bullet holes, as they did in Athens. The shelves in the markets were full of canned vegetables and colorful candies. We would buy a car. I would meet important people. I would wear nylon slips. I would live well.

What mattered was that I leave as soon as I could. My passport had been issued. There was nothing standing in the way. Life had been kind to us.

ARIS TSIRIGOS, ENGLISH TEACHER TO MANOLIS GRIS

He was a good student. Diligent, conscientious. He took care with his homework. At recess he didn’t run around in the courtyard with the other kids, he just sat and watched. He liked difficult words, the ones he thought would impress people. But he didn’t know how to use them properly. When I corrected his papers I always encouraged him to write more simply, but he kept going for the big words.

He tried hard to imitate an American accent. Language requires a good ear, it’s a kind of music. I tried to explain that to those hulking teenagers, but they paid no attention. Except for Gris. He tried, he studied. He worked hard. But he never excelled. He didn’t have a good ear. He couldn’t hear the words. A clean pronunciation, basic syntax — that’s as far as he got.

To be fair, he did improve. He was one of few students who actually improved over the years. He works like the devil , I once said at a faculty meeting, and my fellow teachers laughed. It had gotten to where I was no longer covering his papers with red ink. His English no longer had any mistakes. But his writing was still obviously that of a foreigner, someone who would never grasp the subtle resonances, the cadence of a phrase, the way an idiom can explain everything in just a few words.

He knew that speaking English would open doors for him. That’s why he improved. He didn’t make any embarrassing mistakes, but he also never expressed exactly what was in his mind with the precision of a native speaker. He simply didn’t have the vocabulary.

He always picked up his report card himself. I only saw his mother once: standing respectfully in the door of the teachers’ office, not wanting to disturb us, since we all seemed to be busy. She was waiting for someone to look her way, to muster the courage she needed to open her mouth. The headmaster had sent for her. She left her younger ones at the entrance to the school, she must have given them strict instructions, because they stood there stock still for a long time — the guard even commented on it, said he’d never seen such obedient children. Manolis Gris’s mother was wearing black, a widow , we all thought. Her clothes were ragged from use and from washing. The literature teacher whispered her enthusiastic praise of the velvet braid on the hem and cuffs of the woman’s dress, how lovely , she whispered to the man next to her, with one tiny detail, she’s made that dress fashionable . But what most of us were really admiring was her hair. Glossy and as black as a winter night. She had gathered it into a bun, but little wisps escaped from the hairpins and fell unnoticed at the nape of her neck and at her temples. She must have come at a run. Some of us raised our hands almost imperceptibly. We would happily have reached out to touch that hair. We had frozen in our seats; bent over our papers, we stole glimpses at her. After all, we were the child’s teachers, responsible for his education.