Sophia Nikolaidou: The Scapegoat

Grandma Evthalia keeps close tabs on my education. When I was four, she taught me about ancient mythology. I don’t know any fairytales, child, someone else can tell you about Little Red Riding Hood, what you’ll get from me is Poseidon , she would say, raising her hand as if gripping a trident. She taught me syntax when I was eight, in the second grade, because she didn’t approve of my teacher, or of the modern teaching methods the Ministry of Education decided to implement. Subject, verb, object: she made me mark them with a pencil. She left the butterflies, bugs, and flighty structural approaches , as she called them, nostrils flaring, for kids whose mothers and grandmothers didn’t have literature degrees.

She was the one who bought me my first dictionary — and she didn’t mess around, either, she went straight for Triandafyllidis. We graduates of Aristotle University don’t approve of the Babiniotis approach , she told me, as if an elementary school kid would have any clue what she was talking about. She insisted on teaching me how to use it. She always took it down off the shelf carefully. But one afternoon it slipped from her hands and smashed my favorite toy car, a red one. She waited patiently for me to stop crying. Then she asked me to look up “assemble” in the dictionary and made me copy all the synonyms and antonyms into my notebook.

Mom found it amusing, but she also basically agreed with Grandma’s approach. Grandma advised her to take charge of my education, and she did. What we learned in school wasn’t enough. That was just the basics, the absolute minimum , as Grandma was always saying. I had to do my homework on my own. Mom, meanwhile, taught me the extra stuff, the above-and-beyond, the frosting on the cake that makes the difference between a diligent student and an exceptional one. We filled endless notebooks with language drills and math exercises, the twin pillars of knowledge, the salt of all sciences . Dad just looked on. He went along with my mother’s decisions — after all, he didn’t have time to waste on questioning her judgment.

I liked school. During summer vacation, when we’d go out to a place by the beach in Halkidiki, I was bored out of my mind. Sure, I chased frogs, collected ants, raced down the hill on my bike. I scraped my knees on brambles, did underwater flips in the sea, dug for worms in the dirt. I had to sit quietly in my room during siesta, even if I wasn’t sleeping. Which meant hours of computer games and piles of comic books. Sounds great, right? Maybe, but who could possibly stand it for eighty-six days in a row? In the afternoons Mom would prepare me for the next year’s schoolwork. Sure, I whined, but studying was what saved me.

I don’t know when things took a wrong turn. Mom blames Kitsiou, the mule-faced history and language arts teacher we had last year. She filled my notebooks with red ink. Is this really what you believe? she would scrawl in the margin, enraged at my ideas. He’ll never get far if he keeps going down that path , she once let slip when Mom went in for a conference. My essays suffered from a lack of organization and an overly aggressive sense of irony . Mom’s angry comment to me when she got home was, Her brains aren’t worth a fig . Usually Mom tries to maintain some kind of solidarity with the literature teachers, but with Kitsiou things got so bad she wrote a letter to the principal. The perfect twenty on my report cards of previous years had dropped to a seventeen, then a sixteen, and it looked like it might go even lower. I know my child , Mom insisted to the department head, there’s no way his performance has gotten so poor . But no one could do anything about it. Inside her classroom, a teacher is queen of the realm, as Mom should have known.

I don’t think it was Kitsiou’s fault. At a certain point, school just became unbearable.

But I kept gritting my teeth and bearing it. If it were up to me, I would drop out before graduation. I started getting leg cramps, fevers, awful stomach aches, chronic gastroenteritis. And pain. Like hand grenades exploding in my gut. Once Mom even called a cab and rushed me to the hospital. The doctor smiled.

— It’s just nerves, was his diagnosis.

He gave me a double shot of tranquilizers.

— This would put even a bull to sleep, he told Mom, winking.

A week later the headaches started. I rubbed my eyes until I saw spots. I would’ve gouged my eyes out if I thought it would make the hammering in my head stop. I tied my bandana so tightly it left a mark on my forehead. I couldn’t stand up straight, I had to lean against walls to walk. Mom brought me paracetamol, Lonarid, whatever over-the-counter painkiller she could find. I swallowed them and closed the door.

I basically lived in my room. Everyone seemed like morons. I guess I had a screw loose somewhere.

You can get pretty much any pill you want online. Antidepressants and anti-anxiety meds, Buspirone, hydroxyzine, sertraline, paroxetine, venlafaxine. It’s crazy. Indications, contraindications, proper dosage for facilitating synaptic transmission via serotonin reuptake. Great, as if that made any sense to anyone. No adverse effect on alertness, best results within a month. That’s what the website promised. You have to get off it gradually, though, or you’ll go into withdrawal. They never tell you how bad that part is.

Game over, Mom flipped out. The door to your room is to remain open at all times , she said. Actually, she started leaving all the doors and windows in the house open, to let in fresh air. And she made sure I got my recommended daily allowance of vitamin C, squeezed orange juice for me three times a day. She filled the house with whatever natural dope she could find: sallowthorn, ginseng, spirulina. Royal jelly, saffron tea, pollen. It all went straight down my throat.

And guess what? It turns out sunlight and exercise are all it takes to flood the brain with serotonin. All the magazines say so. Mom read that and made up her mind. For the time being she stopped bugging me about my homework, she figured my psychological well-being took priority.

Maybe it was a fear of competition, like that shrink said. To me he seemed like a nutcase himself. Mom got a zillion recommendations and references before settling on him. He asked a bunch of questions, I counted the pockmarks on the wall. He sang his little song, we handed over a hundred euros, he asked to see me again. Are you kidding me?

I mean, why don’t they all get lost.

All I know is, if I ever have to take another exam in my life, I’ll die.

Souk entrusted me with a list of topics to choose from. He has his own way of speaking. He never just gives you a notebook, he entrusts you with it. When I first had him as a teacher, back in my first year of middle school, I thought he was really tall. It took months for me to realize that he’s actually what you would call average height. But in class he seemed to grow taller, until he filled the whole room. Once he suddenly spread his arms out to his sides. He was wearing black, of course, his uniform , we call it, since he always wears exactly the same outfit, winter or summer. And with his arms spread wide, he looked like an eagle about to swoop down on us. All the kids in the front row ducked. Souk gave an explanation of Attic reduplication in verb forms, then abruptly clapped his wings shut again. An entire class will remember akouo, akikoa for the rest of their lives.

Souk is the one who taught our class what a reference book is. He bought shelves, paid for them out of his own pocket, the gym teacher told us later, shaking his head at Souk’s idiocy. Souk screwed them into the wall next to the blackboard one afternoon after school let out.