Sophia Nikolaidou - The Scapegoat

— I consider it an insult, he said, staring at each of us in turn, that I have to interrupt our lesson to chastise individuals who are practically adults, and will soon be able to exercise their right to vote. An insult to you, he clarified, so there was no misunderstanding.

That day we’d been talking about the Occupation. Security battalions, collaborators, the city’s own historical drama. He showed us photographs and film footage. Concentration camps, human experiments, mass exterminations. Greek Jews being humiliated in the middle of the city, in Eleftheria Square. German soldiers posing for the camera in a swimming pool built of Jewish gravestones over where the university is now.

— Sir, one girl asked, is what we’re seeing a movie, or a documentary? I mean, she added, wide-eyed, did all this really happen?

— History doesn’t happen in outer space, Souk replied without blinking an eye.

He pushed play. Jewish prisoners smiling at the American troops who had come to free them in a documentary about Auschwitz. Skin and bones, lying on mattresses, too weak even to stand up and walk out.

— What I mean, Souk continued, is that history doesn’t happen to other people, in a distant place and time. It’s happening to us, here and now. What we’re living is history. Some people find that idea asphyxiating, but others find it comforting, he added as he started passing around a handout.

On Saturday night I saw Evelina at Oh La La with a group of law students. There were enough crocodiles on their shirts to stock a safari park. Evelina looked happy. I left before I would have to say hello.

Mom says I roam around like an unfulfilled curse. Well, she doesn’t say it to my face, but she whispers it over the phone to Grandma. She’s worried about me. She’d be proud to have a daughter like Evelina.

Whatever. I could care less.

Mom wants me to get better. Better means like her. To care about nothing but studying and grades. To go to university. To get a proper education, find a job. To smile and make her happy. So she can say, It was worth all that effort, he turned out fine in the end .

Mom has opinions about my opinions and beliefs about my beliefs. She knows what’s right. I apparently don’t.

She’s a mother, which means she’s clueless. She wants to help. But that’s impossible: she can’t help, because she’s my mom.

It drives her up the wall not to know what I’m thinking.

Take the other day. I saw a dead guy, and when I told her, she freaked out. He was on the sidewalk in front of school. He had jumped off the fifth-floor balcony. The body wasn’t even cold when I got there. The neighbors came outside, got some rope from the shop across the way and cordoned off the street. The religion teacher stood on the corner telling kids to go around to the side entrance, without explaining why. The ambulance took forever to come. The first-years managed to see it all, even the guy’s red socks. He wasn’t wearing shoes, just wool socks, fire-engine red, you could see them from far off. The ambulance came and took the corpse away, and then during second break they came to clean up the blood. They kept scrubbing the pavement, but it still left a stain. At night the dead guy’s mother came down and lit a candle. She left a bouquet of chrysanthemums, which we found there the next day. The first-years dragged their rolling backpacks around the spot so as not to disturb the little altar.

— Did that man really have to commit suicide here of all places, right in front of the school? one mother commented. It reminded me of something Souk once said: Parents are the most despicable category of people. Childrearing does something to them, it must be hormonal . That was last year, when a parent came into the office to bawl out the German teacher. I bet the German teacher wanted to agree, but she held her tongue.

No one knows why the guy jumped. The neighbors have various theories. Some say he’d been unemployed for a while; others say he was gay, because of the red socks; most of the teachers at school think there must have been some deeper psychological issue.

— Those aren’t mutually exclusive, the woman at the kiosk said, shaking her head as if she knew.

The girls all averted their eyes and went in through the side door. Except for Evelina, who refused to change her route. She walked right by without even looking his way. I went over to see.

Right now you’re seeing your first dead man, open your eyes, concentrate for once in your life .

I tried to feel something, but nothing came.

I’m a monster.

Yesterday Dad gave me his file with materials about Gris. Newspaper clippings, interviews, old photographs. A whole box of books, all hypothesizing about what really happened.

— These are the illustrious sources which, I take it, you’ve been discussing in history class, he teased.

I spread it all out on the bed and started with the photographs. Gris in profile at the trial. Ashen, though that might just have been the paper.

— When elephants dance the ants always pay the price, Dad called from the living room.

It’s his favorite saying. It represents his whole idea of human justice in a nutshell. As for divine justice, which Grandma invokes, when you get right down to it Dad doesn’t really care. Dad believes justice has to be served in life, because everything else is just stories the priests make up. Religious nonsense to help them rule over the sleeping hordes .

Mom says Dad has a keen sense of justice , by which she means rigid, not keen. For Dad justice is black and white. There’s good and bad, right and wrong in any situation. Anyone who flip-flops must be sitting in a dirty nest. Grandma is a conciliatory type, and always says that there are gray areas, blind spots, forces at work that we can’t see from the outside , but Dad’s theory doesn’t allow for that point of view.

According to Dad, philosophers and lawyers spill ink like cuttlefish, they muddy the waters, play the venal game of Mammon. They obscure the obvious . For him, the word justice is a holy word, even if politicians and judges try to cut it down to their size .

— Justice isn’t a matter of procedural pirouettes, it’s a basic human instinct. As powerful an instinct as hunger or thirst. Justice isn’t about laws. Any child can distinguish between right and wrong without having to read the penal code.

When he talks about stuff like that his face gets all red and the veins in his neck bulge like cords. It used to embarrass me, I was ashamed of how passionate he got. Later I realized that lots of people were sympathetic to his eruptions, in fact some admired him for them. At the newspaper, barking all the time is a plus.

Truth conquers all, and if you have the truth on your side, you need to make yourself heard. That’s what Dad thinks. He belongs to the generation that believed in demonstrations. Maybe that’s why, when a conversation gets heated, he leaves logic behind and takes refuge in slogans and quotes.

— Sir, I don’t know where to start.

— Real research takes guts, Georgiou. It’s not just copying and pasting from the Internet.

— Sir, I found the books you recommended, but there are so many, and the writing isn’t very clear.

Souk wasn’t in a mood to rebuke me, but he did it anyhow.

— That’s what historical sources are like, Georgiou. If you’d prefer, you can study for class like everyone else, but then you’d get bored of parroting back information. Did you think the critical analysis of primary sources would be easy?

He raised his eyes to the heavens. It’s something he does in class when we bring him to the point of despair. It’s a look I call stop-bothering-me-you-fool. I wasn’t going to lay my weapons down so easily.