Sophia Nikolaidou - The Scapegoat

The foreign journalists turned out to be some of the most easily shocked, and expressed their horror from a safe distance. Their mothers hadn’t been slain, their sisters hadn’t been hacked to pieces, their houses hadn’t been torched. They urged people to remain calm, rattled off declarations of human rights, promoted humanistic ideals. They wrote articles, took photographs. And then they boarded their airplanes and left, and flew home to sleep easily in London or distant Oklahoma.

Perhaps it was just bad timing: the wrong person in the wrong place at the wrong time. But now things were settled summarily and speciously. The case couldn’t be dragged out any longer. They were walking on hot coals, so they might as well dance.

MINAS

They won’t give me money for the class trip. 629 euros for six days is way too much , Mom says. What she means is that it’s way too much for someone who isn’t going to university. He who has ears, let him hear , says Grandma, who doesn’t let a fly shit without comment. Fine, fair enough. It’s your money. Next year, when I’m an adult, we can talk again.

I don’t even bother bringing up the Air Jordans, since I already know the answer: In Africa kids run around barefoot, and you have three pairs of shoes. We don’t have money to waste on nonsense .

In our house Mom gets to decide what’s nonsense and what’s not. It’s pretty much a dictatorship. They used to try and trick me into thinking we made decisions democratically. There were three of us, so we voted. I don’t need to tell you the score. At some point I figured it out. You guys always agree, I’ll never get my way , I complained. It was my first lesson in majority rule.

— The glory and the weakness of the democratic system, Evelina once commented in class, pointing at me, is that his vote counts as much as mine.

I can just picture her studying law. She’ll rise to the top, no doubt about it. I mean, she’s killer.

Last year she showed up at the debate tournament with a stack of notes and her father’s Mont Blanc. She was bossing everyone around, giving orders. But when they asked her a question about the stock market crash of 1929, she froze. It wasn’t in our history book. She doesn’t care about anything that won’t be on the Panhellenic Exams.

In the twenty minutes our group was given to prep, I went over the whole history from the crash to Lehman Brothers. It was one of the few times in her life when Evelina shut up and took notes. She was epic, though, I have to admit. She went up to the podium and pretty much smoked all the private school kids. She had her usual expression on, the one that suits her best: a German shepherd with a job to do. She didn’t let anyone else finish a sentence.

— I’m sorry if I’m getting a bit competitive, she apologized, smiling at the judges.

They smiled right back. Dumb as bricks. She had them in the palm of her hand right from the start.

Evelina isn’t going on the class trip, either. It’s too close to Easter, she can’t afford to lose even a day of studying. I’m sure she talked her dad into putting the money aside for her, so she’ll be able to take a trip this summer instead, to celebrate.

No Prague for me, I might as well accept it. I won’t see the old clock tower with the statue of Death, won’t retrace Kafka’s steps, won’t go to that club I found on the Internet. I won’t get to see what airplane food is like: goulash, boiled vegetables, chocolate cake. I’ll just rot here in Thessaloniki. Kamara to Diagonios to Aristotle Square — the entire city center by foot in fifteen minutes. My whole life spent in a tiny speck on the map. Nine hundred steps along the sidewalk of Tsimiski Avenue. I counted.

Dad hates this city, but Grandma adores it. She’s an old-time Thessalonian, she grew up on Plato Street, her balcony looked onto the Church of the Virgin Acheiropoiitos. On Good Friday she would go down and buy her votive candle as soon as the bells started ringing. For Grandma all that really counts as Thessaloniki is the part of the city inside the Byzantine walls. Everything outside the walls was just muddy fields in her day: Don’t be fooled, dear, by all the apartment buildings they’ve built out there, back then when it rained the whole place was one big mud pit . Anything east of the White Tower is a foreign country as far as she’s concerned, Toumba’s a suburb, and Panorama up on the hill is countryside. Western Thessaloniki is a parallel universe she reads about in the paper, in the articles Dad edits.

Grandma always does her hair in that poofy old-lady style. She paints her nails and smokes thin cigarettes. She has more memories than you would believe. The other people in her apartment building call her the principal , even though she was only ever a teacher. Whenever anyone goes out shopping they stop by her place first to see if she needs anything: a loaf of bread, some tsipouro, marinated anchovies. Grandma is a foodie. She drinks her glass of tsipouro every afternoon with the TV on. She goes out for coffee with her endless girlfriends, whom Mom describes as tough old broads . They talk about politics, about the city’s lost splendor, about the latest movies. Grandma’s a movie junkie, says Dad, who has a soft spot for her. You couldn’t exactly call her a cinephile, since she loves detective films and thrillers. She and Dad always place bets on the Oscars. Nine times out of ten Grandma wins, and Dad buys her pirated versions of the winning films from the African street vendors.

— You’re a godless man, she scolds him. How many times have I told you not to buy from them? Their knock-offs are going to ruin my DVD player.

Grandma considers Dad an unrepentant socialist. Too welcoming of foreigners, an armchair activist with a philanthropic theory handy whenever it’s time to discuss the downtrodden. She has no patience for his kind of tolerance. In her view all black people stink, no matter what Dad says about non-Western diets and spices.

— They’ve turned the Rotonda into a gypsy camp, you can’t walk anywhere without stepping on their handbags. I can’t understand why nothing’s been done. Is the mayor blind?

Dad smiles but doesn’t reply. Grandma considers herself his ears in the city, because if he tried to get any real news from his lefty friends, he’d be waiting a long time , she says, shaking her head.

It’s true, though, Grandma actually is his political barometer. She’ll vote for PASOK to get New Democracy to clean up its act, or for New Democracy to punish PASOK.

— It’s not that Evthalia can’t make up her mind, Dad established early on. It’s that she’s an actual undecided voter. It’s her kind who determine the final outcome. If we all had her balls, we wouldn’t just vote for the same party year in and year out.

He made sure to take it back right away, though, so Grandma wouldn’t use it against him.

Dad is a displaced lefty who used to believe that PASOK would save the country. Even now, no matter how enraged he gets with the socialists, he always comes through at the ballot box. He can’t bear to vote for anyone else. If you think about it, it’s pretty stupid to vote for a single party your whole life long, but Dad considers it political consistency.

No one at school reads the newspaper, and whatever news they watch is just STAR or sports results. The other day Souk blew up in class. Someone at the back of the room was talking, and he got us all out of our chairs. Souk never yells. His method is to turn the volume down, not up. It’s incredibly effective, I wonder why it never occurred to anyone else.