Sophia Nikolaidou - The Scapegoat

So Kyriakos could say what he liked about us ending up part of the suit-wearing proletariat. Degree or no degree , he would say, we’re all the same, the same millstone grinds us all down . Kyriakos could say plenty more along those lines, particularly when he got riled up. He mocked Crete, called her a marquise , sneered at her coiffed hair, at the way she pronounced legal phrases, with a calm distaste, as if they felt dirty in her mouth. Kyriakos was smarter than any of us. The law professors were always talking about the country kid who had come down from his village to study in the city and was at his books night and day.

The professors were charmed by his passion, but even more by the precision of his language, by his sound judgment and fine rhetoric. The students who came in second and third, right behind him, claimed that his brilliant wordplay in the lecture hall only showed that he was a godless sophist. His teachers, who valued such rhetorical sleights-of-hand, thought it demonstrated his admirably wide base of knowledge.

Kyriakos did well in school, and after graduating, too. Soon enough he had become one of Crete’s kind, full of irony and witticisms. He bought an apartment in town for his parents and brought them down from the village. His mother stopped wearing her headscarf and robe. She blessed the marriage of her only son to Crete’s cousin Sofoula, a girl with a considerable dowry and ambitions for a wedding in the Metropolitan Church.

The day I went to find him, the newspapers were on the war path, and the whole city hummed with news of the murder. I made an appointment through the secretary at his office, a young woman who sat anxiously typing carbon-paper triplicates. Kyriakos welcomed me with a rehearsed smile.

He explained to me that it was impossible. Things weren’t as simple as they seemed.

— Caesar’s wife must be above suspicion.

— What’s that supposed to mean? I lashed out.

Kyriakos made a gesture with his hand. To him the conversation was pointless.

— He already confessed. The only thing anyone can do, perhaps, is to save your mother. Violeta, this is not a time for emotion. One and one make two. Open your eyes.

— Look at you, Kyriakos Lolos, a boy from the village, valedictorian of our class in 1937, the young man who gathered up crumbs from lunch and saved them for dinner, who studied by the light of borrowed candles, who used to say that guilt is the creation of circumstance. Look what’s become of you. My brother is innocent. I know it and you know it, too.

— Violeta, you’re not being logical.

— Logic isn’t always the best advisor. Aren’t you the one who used to say that? That the hegemony of logic is responsible for some of the most fundamental misunderstandings?

— I wish I could help, Violeta. But your brother’s case has already been tried.

— It’s been tried outside the courts. That’s what you’re telling me.

Kyriakos didn’t breathe another word. It was hard even for him to say to my face what anyone with eyes in his head could see.

KYRIA MARIA GRIS, MOTHER OF MANOLIS

It was dark as tar, rainy weather .

When they burst into my house to turn the place upside-down, I had just lain down with my feet propped against the wall. My feet were swollen something awful, my knees had been killing me since morning. I heard footsteps and knew. I ran to the door. I didn’t care about the pain or anything.

A mother’s curse never fails.

May a bereaved mother never cross your path , the old women in Trabzon used to say. She’ll burn up your joy, poison your day .

Those men weren’t men, they were mules. Pigs.

— Hey! Don’t you have mothers of your own? I shouted, but they’d come there to get a job done.

Which is to say, not even a troop of janissaries could have stopped them, much less pleading and tears.

They turned the whole house upside-down. They even searched the lamp in front of my icons. They pawed the girls’ nightgowns, flipped through our books, read all our papers. They found the one about Savvas.

— One son a hero, the other a traitor, they said.

Evgnosia put her hand over my mouth.

— Don’t say a thing, Mother. Our silence will protect Manolis.

But there was no way of hushing Violeta. She couldn’t abide injustice. Her head had swelled at the university, she’d read the laws. She knew right from wrong, not the way we learn it at home, but how it’s written in books.

— You have no right, you have no proof, she shouted in their faces.

They paid her no heed at all. They asked their questions, I answered. They made me write a paper and sign it. I told them I never went to school, I might make mistakes, Violeta was the one in our house who had studied.

— Don’t worry, ma’am, said a young man standing off to one side, just write the words and don’t worry about that.

When they asked me to come with them, that’s when my legs started hurting again. In all the commotion I’d forgotten the pain. My mother was right when she used to say, you can bear any pain if you have other worries on your mind.

I’m bearing, Mother. I’m bearing.

And troubled years came full of tears

since the barbarians came, and took my son

and killed my race, and smashed and burned .

With fire and axes they took our souls away .

We never had anything to do with the police, we aren’t communists. We believe in Christ. Later on, at the trial, they said all kinds of things. They said we collaborated with the Reds. My boy joined the Party, it’s true. He needed work. Do you think he had many offers to choose from? But they kicked him out, they figured out fast enough that he wasn’t one of them. I tried to cheer him up, told him it was better to keep his distance. He would find another job, he was good at whatever he tried. When anyone called, he ran to help.

I’d had my dream. I never dream anything significant, I fall in bed like a log and sleep like a log until morning. But two days before my name day, all my dead came to see me in my sleep. They crowded in on all sides. My dead babies wrapped in blankets, fresh out of my belly, with the eyes of the very old. Eyes that know life is an uphill battle. My mother, young, with a braid in her hair and a kerchief, in her best dress and an embroidered apron. My father in his burial clothes. My mother-in-law with the tin basin, the one I washed her feet in, and her wedding coins sewn to the chest of her dress. My husband Stathis with those thick eyebrows of his, and the mole on his forehead. Savvas with a starched white shirt hanging out of his pants. Tuck that in, boy , I shouted. He was so thin, with cheeks as yellow as kaseri cheese. All around were cousins and neighbors, nephews and distant uncles. They all stood there in a crowd, none of them said a word, all you could hear was an mmmmmmm , something like church, or a song.

— Why aren’t you talking? I asked them right to their faces. Say something! If you’ve gone to the trouble of rising from the earth to visit me, you can’t have all come here tonight for anything good.

I woke with them still on my mind.

I counted them and remembered them one by one, twenty-seven in all, more than the house could fit, if they’d actually come. I was angry with Savvas. The rest had been buried for years, they’d forgotten and been forgotten, I rarely mentioned them in my prayers — except for my mother, of course — but Savvas was everywhere I turned. His photograph, framed in the sitting room. My blessed child, there at every turn. I was standing in front of that photograph, ready to give him a piece of my mind, when Evgnosia called to me.

— Mother, come quick! The lamp broke.